It was by far the hottest summer in the three years we’d been in Tokyo. I couldn’t go out without feeling unequal to the challenge of getting back home. Even when I put the air conditioning on in the apartment, I could still hear the relentless mating calls of the cicadas outside—like chainsaws in a rain forest—reminding me of the intensity beyond the windows. Children went by in the mornings, dragging their feet and perspiring. I couldn’t wait to see them skip and scuffle again in the fall. And what must it have been like for really old people? Every morning, all spring, there had been a woman across the road who pulled the few dozen hairs she had left into a tiny bun at the back of her head, opened her sliding door, put down a mat, and knelt to weed with chopsticks in her tiny garden of potted flowers. I hadn’t seen her in weeks.

There were Sundays when it was almost too hot for our favorite weekend treat of crêpes in the Omotesando area of Tokyo. Some Japanese like to say that Omotesando is like the Champs Elysées in Paris. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Omotesando is shorter and narrower, and most of its charm is hidden in its side streets.

This was one of those hot Sundays. We had settled ourselves at Le Bretagne, and had been served our usual order of galettes complete with cider when Hank said, “The people in the office think I’m sleeping with Ikeda-san.” He related this as if it was supposed to be funny, but it was amazing how simultaneously my face felt hot and my heart felt cold. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if Natalie, who worked at Louis Vuitton, hadn’t told me just the day before that her company’s French president had given his rather severe wife the heave-ho in favor of a sparkling Japanese sales manager.

“Oh?” I said, forking some warm cheese and ham into our three-year-old son, Miller.

“Can you believe that?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“She’s a bit of a flirt, you know.”

I looked at him. “I didn’t know.” Miller was losing interest in his food, so I let him shake some salt on it.

“Yeah,” Hank continued, sitting back with a fresh cup of cider, easing into his story. His big, boyish face belied the way his broad chest and thick arms made him look prepared for anything. “When she started she was making one of the other guys really uncomfortable by bringing him tea every morning and standing on tiptoe to adjust
his tie and stuff.”

“I thought that was their job.”

“Not in foreign companies it isn’t.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Hank didn’t seem to register the chill in my tone—he’s used to me being a little sarcastic—and continued his story.

“Yeah. So when she came over to me I told her she was
being unprofessional.”

“Can I play with the shoes, Mommy?” Miller asked.

“Sure, sweets,” I said, wiping his face. He slid off his chair and headed for the wooden clogs artfully arranged in the corner of the room. “How’d she take it?” I asked Hank. I wasn’t sure I was enjoying the conversation, but I was always quite fascinated by the ways Japanese women worked things out for themselves.

“She definitely looked shocked,” he said. “And a little huffy. I guess I caused her to lose face.”

He dug back into his food with enthusiasm, but I wasn’t ready to do the same. “So why the rumor?”

“What?”

“Why do people think you’re sleeping with her?”

“It gives them something to do?” he suggested.

I looked at him skeptically over the rim of my cup. “She’s not
even that pretty.”

Hank looked very surprised to hear this, but then seemed to correct himself. “Look,” he said, “she’s only twenty-two. Her father probably never talks to her, her mother’s probably a grin-and-bear-it housewife. She’s had no one to teach her how to behave in an office.”

“Until now,” I said, and we both looked out the window rather than at each other. On the sidewalk, a pair of well-dressed Japanese women with little designer handbags over their forearms wondered whether or not to brave this foreign restaurant. They caught sight of us staring at them and skittered away.

Hank shook his head. “It’s just getting a little weird again. I think I’ll try to find her a mentor.”

We heard Miller shouting “I don’t like you!” to someone in the corner, and Hank got up, leaving me alone with the dregs of my cider and a heart he had set spinning like a penny.

There was too much come and go for me in Tokyo. It took the first nine months to find Melitta, a German woman Miller and I met in a nearby playground. She and I used to have tea together a few times a week and share Japan survival tactics. When she had trouble during her second pregnancy, I looked after her little boy for a few days. It began to feel like I was living in a neighborhood rather than just on a street. But her husband’s job suddenly took them to Paris. We wrote for a while, but then she had a third child.

I liked Natalie, but she worked all the time. The women at the American Club—a sprawling complex cheek-by-jowl with the Russian Embassy where we could laugh with our mouths wide open, order club sandwiches, put up signs when we wanted to sell our king-size comforters or exercise bicycles—were friendly and energetic, but since they always seemed to be striving so hard for their grim smiles, I didn’t want to rain on their parades. There was a beautiful young Japanese woman living upstairs from us with her husband and two little boys, and sometimes I thought we could be friends. We were always meeting in the echoing marble entrance and calling to each other that we should get together soon (her English was letter perfect), though we hardly ever did. The one time she did manage to come by, I sat and envied her hair, her clothes, and her face, while she told me about the PhD she was hoping to do someday on the Japanese attitude toward Jews. I don’t remember what brought it on. She just seemed to be bursting with it, as if it were some sort of confession. I wasn’t sure I could do that again.

A Korean family moved in next door sometime that spring. The wife’s name was Sook Young. I only remembered because I made her write it down for me, and had stuck it up on the kitchen wall. When I first saw her, with her heavy long hair pulled up and her mules and trendy dress, I immediately thought bimbo. She was unusually leggy, unusually voluptuous, and her fingers were long and strong. Soon afterward I heard the most beautiful music coming through her front door. It turned out that she was singing it. And playing the piano.

Our kitchens were right next to each other, and every evening I heard her chopping away like crazy. Once I went over to see if she could spare an egg. She came to the door in an apron, with a shiny, sweating face and strands of hair like careless strokes of calligraphy on her cheeks and forehead. Her smile was so sweet, it was like one of those Japanese cartoons.

“Wow!” I said when Miller and I followed her into the kitchen. I was making a quiche, which I thought was pretty fancy until I saw what Sook Young was preparing. She’d just fried some chicken and placed it on a glass plate lined with lettuce. I could smell rice cooking. There was a salad and something dark green and fermented-looking already on the dining table.

“What are you making?” she asked me.

“Quiche,” I answered.

“What is quiche?”

“Oh, it’s kind of a cheesy pie. Eggs, milk, cheese, vegetables, maybe a little bacon or salmon. In a pie crust.”

“And?”

“And?”

“Just quiche?”

“Yeah, just quiche.”

She sighed. “You are so lucky.”

“I am?”

“If I no put many dishes, my husband very unhappy. Is. Is
very unhappy.”

I studied her flushed face. “Every day?”

She nodded, sliding hairs away with the back of her hand.

“Yikes,” I said.

She laughed and rubbed Miller on the head. She opened the fridge, releasing an aromatic cloud smelling of cold garlic, dried chili, and something between ginger and dirt. She found me an egg and slipped a chocolate into Miller’s hand.

Back in our apartment, I tried to doll up my quiche with a ring of cucumber slices around the edge of the plate. I did feel lucky not to have to sweat it out in the kitchen for so long every night. People everywhere paid so much more attention to detail than I did—the ash around the eyes, the bamboo stake through the lip, the beads and shells, the lingerie, the deliberate contrasts. You would never see a matched set of porcelain at a Japanese meal. Each plate or bowl was chosen for the way it suited the dish or tidbit being served. I could hardly look at my wedding china anymore, it was so monotonous. And when a woman put on a kimono, the obi she tied it with had to be made not only in a contrasting design but also of a contrasting fabric. Meanwhile I went around in navy slacks and a white shirt, and sometimes I remembered to change my earrings.

I saw Sook Young again on the following Saturday morning. I’d taken Miller out for a spin around our block of tightly packed apartment buildings on his tricycle. People rose late on the weekends, so there were few cars about. Sook Young was coming in from grocery shopping. I’d seen her husband driving off in a champagne-
colored Jaguar earlier.

“Was that your car?” I asked her after I mentioned seeing him.

She shook her head. “Company car. My husband is playing golf with his boss.”

“I see,” I said. “That explains the amazing green shirt. Does he play a lot of golf?”

She thought for a moment. “Golf,” she said. “Golf is . . . Golf is the other woman.”

She smiled, so I laughed. “I guess having the Jaguar to drive on the weekends is no compensation.”

It took her a little while to understand this, but then she nodded repeatedly. “No compensation,” she said, enjoying the word. She said it again. “No compensation.”

It was so easy to tell Hank I loved him. “Love you,” we always said at the end of a call if I phoned him at the office. Another woman might have told her husband in the middle of sex, to increase the tenderness of the event, but I knew Hank didn’t like to be interrupted. He was very hearty about his lovemaking, in a charming, prehistoric way. That night, though, he started to talk.

“You know what I like, Cath?” he asked between deep breaths, snatching me back to the present from a reverie about a high school biology teacher.

“Tell me,” I replied warmly, astounded and aroused by this
new intimacy.

“Slippers,” he exhaled back.

“What?”

“Slippers,” he said again. The word had apparently flipped his switch and he was thrusting again.

Before we fell asleep I turned to him. “Slippers, Hank?”

“Never mind,” he said.

“What kind of slippers?”

“Forget it, okay?”

Hank’s attention was in short supply in Tokyo, since he was so motivated about his work. We’d sit down to dinner and I’d see him shake his head a little as he lifted his fork. Sometimes his lips even moved.

“Who are you talking to?” I’d ask him, and he’d smile, but it wasn’t enough to bring him all the way home.

So one morning, when it was clearly going to be unbelievably hot, I pulled out the shorts I’d been wearing when we met, and put them on. I was already wearing my bathing suit, in anticipation of doing some laps at the American Club, but I had yet to throw on a top. I went out to the kitchen where Hank was making his morning coffee.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said back, then did a double-take.

“Aren’t those—?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling and doing a turn for him.

He poured his coffee, then looked at me again. “They’re getting a little old, don’t you think?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I should have said yes. No, I should have said no and shut him up. Instead I had to ask him what he meant.

“Well, they just seem to have lost their shape a bit, that’s all,” he said, sipping. “Why don’t you go out and get yourself a new pair?”

Ha ha. He had no idea what it was like for an American woman of average size to shop in a city like Tokyo. I was a size 10 at home, a perfect M in my opinion, but in a country where clothes were made for laxative-popping secretaries (excuse me, assistants) like Ikeda-san, I was huge. I’d been an extra large for three years.

“Fly me home,” I told him.

“What?”

“Japanese clothes don’t fit me, Hank. Not to mention the fact
that they’re ugly.”

“They’re not all ugly,” he said.

“No? Where’ve you been shopping?”

“Come on, Cathy, this is a huge city. There must be something big enough for you in it.”

“I have better things to do with my time.”

“Fair enough,” he said, setting his coffee mug in the sink. This was office speak—how he talked to his employees. In his mind, Hank had already hit the road.

He kissed me on the cheek when he left, but kissed Miller on his Rice Krispie-flecked lips. I tried not to let it bother me, but it did. Poor Miller found out just how much when he went and poured himself some more apple juice just for the fun of pouring, then refused to drink it, right before we needed to leave the apartment to get him to daycare.

“Drink it,” I said.

He didn’t move a muscle.

“Drink it,” I said again, enunciating with menace.

He was a statue, staring at the table. Very impressive.

I picked up the little green cup and held it in front of his mouth. I should have softened here, but felt myself make the choice to go on. “If you aren’t going to drink it,” I told him, “don’t pour it!” I slammed the cup back down on the word pour. The apple juice jumped up out of the cup and splashed onto Miller’s shorts. The ball I was trapped in started rolling faster down its hill. I pointed to the front door. “Go and get your shoes on,” I ordered.

Miller looked down at his wet shorts.

“Go!” I shouted. “Hurry up!” I pulled him out of his chair and pushed him toward his shoes. When I got him there he finally started wailing in disbelief. He had a point. I hardly ever shouted at him. But I was lost, and started shoving his shoes on his feet.

“But my shorts are all wet, Mommy!” he sobbed. “I’m all wet!”

“And whose fault is that?” I hissed back. When I looked at his face I could see that he had quite logically worked out that it was my fault, so I quickly pressed on. “Okay, okay,” I said resentfully, dragging his shorts down and unbalancing him so he had to put his hands on my shoulders. I should have hugged him then. Instead, I got up and left him standing alone by the door in his little Thomas the Tank Engine underpants, and went to get him some clean shorts.

When I returned his face was wet with tears and snot was creeping toward his top lip. I pulled the clean shorts on over his shoes and grabbed a tissue from the bathroom.

“Blow,” I commanded, holding the tissue over his nose. He wouldn’t. His big brown eyes stared at me. Tears had pulled his long eyelashes into shiny stars. “Blow,” I said. “NOW!” We glared at each other. Part of me wanted to whack him so hard. Another part knew I should cuddle him and bleat apologies. Yet another part had nothing but admiration for his defiance in the face of my uncontrollable rage. I was desperate for him to obey me, but then again I would have hated for my little boy to be afraid of me. The hell with it, I thought, and stuck the tissue in my waistband. I reached for his backpack, shoved my feet into flip-flops, and pushed him out the door.

When it clicked behind me I realized I’d left my keys inside.

“Oh no,” I said.

Miller blinked. “What, Mommy?” He could tell I wasn’t focused on him anymore, and looked hopeful.

“I left my keys inside.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

“Sure. Except that I can’t get back in, can I?”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh no.”

I deserved to be locked out. “Silly Mommy,” I said.

Miller knew this was his key to smile again. “Silly Mommy!”

“Silly Mommy getting so angry she can’t remember her keys.” I picked him up and put him on my right hip, with his backpack over my left shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Miller,” I said with my nose right up against his cheek. “I got too angry.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “Now I’ll blow my nose.”

People simply did not walk down the streets of Tokyo—even the back streets—in bathing suits and shapeless shorts. This wasn’t a terribly serious problem for me, though, since everything foreigners did was considered relatively strange. You could see it in their faces as you passed. It was like they were thinking, “That’s weird! Oh, wait, she’s a foreigner. Figures.” Every once in a while you’d see a flash of “I wish I could do that” in their eyes, usually if it was winter and you’d put on a nice warm hat. This was a country where, not so long ago, they walked around all year in sandals and two-toed socks. When it snowed, they put the sandals on stilts. Drier, but still cold. So walking back home from the daycare center in a Speedo wasn’t a problem for me. What was embarrassing was standing outside my building with no keys.

I pressed Sook Young’s buzzer, desperately dragging the depths of my brain for the correct pronunciation of her name.

“Oh!” she exclaimed when she saw me on the video intercom.

“I’m locked out,” I said. “Can you let me in?”

“Yes,” she said, and the doors slid open.

“Wait!” I shouted into the speaker, worried that she thought this was all I needed. “Can I come to your apartment?”

I heard her laugh. “Of course.”

When she opened the door she laughed again, gesturing for me to come inside. Sometimes her English deserted her completely.

“May I use your phone?” I asked.

She pointed, then sat down to watch me.

I called Hank. I told him what had happened and said, “You’ve got your keys, right? Can I come and get them?”

“Sure,” he said. Then he added, “Wait, let me think. Would it be better for you if I put them in a cab and asked the driver to take them over?”

“Too risky,” I said. There were almost no such risks in Japan, but I wanted to inject myself into his day and get a better look at Ikeda-san. I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away. “I’ll be there in
about a half hour.”

“You have money?” he asked.

“I’ll get some.” Sook Young was smiling in such a friendly way that I knew this was true.

“See you in a bit, then,” he said, and we hung up.

Sook Young sat up straight, as if ready for whatever I was
going to say next.

“Can I take a shower?” I asked her. I’d worked up quite a sweat.

“Of course,” she said, getting up.

I stood as well. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“Can I have some money?”

She laughed outright. “Anything,” she said.

While I was in the shower, hoping that the woodsy-smelling goo I was putting on my hair was shampoo, she pulled out some clothes for me. She may have been Asian, but she was my size.

“You need underwear?” she called through the door.

“Um, actually, yes. Do you mind?”

In answer, the door opened a little bit and her hand came in, depositing a couple of lacy white garments on the edge of the sink. It entered again with a towel, then withdrew, at which point I stepped out and dried myself. Wrapped in the towel, I picked up her hairbrush, which was full of her long, unbelievably strong black hairs. This made me think of Ikeda-san. Her hair must feel like this, I thought. If Hank was having an affair, I could imagine strands of it between his thumb and index finger. Not pale brown (or, let’s face it, occasionally white) like mine, but black and heavy and musky and young. I clawed Sook Young’s hairs out of the brush and dropped them in the little plastic trash can.

When my own hair was brushed, I unwrapped myself from the towel and pulled on the panties Sook Young had chosen for me. I put my arms through the bra straps and leaned over to drop my breasts into the cups. Standing up to do the hook, I had a shock. I was beautiful. “Is it okay?” Sook Young asked from beyond the door, which was still a little ajar.

“I look fabulous!” I called back and opened the door to step out.

“We are the same size!” she exclaimed, handing me some shorts and a light blue knitted top. “Don’t worry,” she added. “The underwear is new.”

“Do I look worried?” I said, pulling on the very cute khaki shorts. “Where did you buy them?”

“Isetan,” she said. “Very cheap.”

I loved this. Most people in Japan didn’t like to talk about how cheaply they bought stuff. In fact, according to Natalie, despite the still-struggling economy, Louis Vuitton had never done better.

I pulled on the top, and we both looked at me in the mirror of
her vanity table.

“I feel like I’m in college again,” I said.

She smiled and nodded at my reflection. “I’m never bored with you.” She handed me a five-thousand-yen bill at the door. I couldn’t bring myself to borrow shoes as well, so I put on my flip-flops and went out into the heat.

In the back of the cool taxi I felt like a million bucks. In my mind I was full of youthful irresponsibility, and I was on my way to surprise my boyfriend. I planned how I’d step into Hank’s office, turn my back on his busy colleagues, and flash him a view of the lacy bra I was wearing.

When we arrived I got out of the taxi, laughed at the ugly clothes in the window of the designer boutique—Hanae Mori just wouldn’t quit it with the bias cuts and the butterflies—and got in the elevator. The blood in my body felt like sap rising. I breezed past the uniformed receptionist, walked down the hall and turned the corner. Hank saw me through his window and nodded at me to come in. When I opened the door I saw that he was talking to Ikeda-san.

Even though she was reclining in her chair, her back was poker straight, pushing her little apple breasts up and slightly out of her fancy black tank top. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, and her legs were crossed. The tension in the room made it hard to breathe. Hank looked like a coil of steel.

“Here’s the other woman I sleep with,” he said to Ikeda-san.

He thought he was joking, but I didn’t laugh and Ikeda-san didn’t move a muscle. She kept looking at him as if he were going to tell her what she should do. There was definitely some satisfaction in watching him struggle between wanting to guide Ikeda-san in the right direction and wondering what I was going to do as I towered over her. I considered breaking her arm, not because I thought she had seduced my husband—I wasn’t sure about that—but because it would have been so easy to do. I feel the same way about Chihuahuas.

“Nice to see you again,” I finally said, holding out a hand in a way that would force her to stand up to shake it. I could have bowed slightly, and she could have bowed back, but I thought she should get up.

She did. “Nice to see you again, too,” she said, and we shook. Her hand was limp and cold and damp, and submitted to the force of mine as if it were holding its breath and praying for deliverance. How could this person have been attractive? Why was submission better
than enthusiasm?

At this point I knew that, having performed our ritual, we were supposed to turn back to Hank, but I wasn’t ready. “How are you?” I asked, looking her up and down. That was when I noticed her slippers, their little embossed bears staring me cheekily in the face. Where I came from, women wore sneakers for the commute and pumps for the office. In Tokyo they wore heels for the folks on the subway and slippers for the boss. No wonder the men went crazy. These women looked ready for bed at all hours.

“Fine, thank you,” she answered, and tried once again to
turn to Hank.

“Nice shoes,” I said.

She giggled, a little confused, but clearly relieved that I was keeping things mundane.

“Do you have different styles, depending on your outfit, or maybe what mood you’re in?”

“Cathy,” Hank interrupted, “I think Ikeda-san has things to do.”

“Oh, sure. You bet. Sorry. Don’t let me keep you.”

She left. Hank got up to close the door behind her.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded, turning on me like a bull.

“Is Ikeda-san’s bra padded?”

“What?”

“It looks like it to me.”

He threw up his arms. “How would I know?”

“Give me the keys, Hank.”

“No. What’s going on?”

I put out a hand.

He reached into his pocket looking extremely confused.

“Thanks,” I said when he’d laid the keys on my palm, warm from his heavy thigh. I turned and put a hand on the door.

“Wait,” he said.

I stopped and looked back. His face reminded me of the way he behaved when we started dating, when he really wanted to kiss me.

“You look great,” he said. “Where’d you get those clothes?”

“Sook Young,” I responded flatly.

“They fit you really well.”

“You’re surprised?” I still had my hand on the door, but I turned my body a bit toward him.

“I thought you said Japanese clothes didn’t fit you.”

“Sook Young is Korean.”

“Oh,” Hank said, nodding. “Uh-huh.”

He was looking at my breasts, staring at them like a thirteen-year-old. I watched a hard-on point to the space his keys had left, then begin to fill it. I had known in the taxi that I was going to turn him on. I had been on the war path, and I’d scalped the enemy. But now all I could think was, Next time, remind me to marry a grown-up.

“Think she’d let you have the shorts?” he said.

I looked down at Sook Young’s clothes. My old red shorts reminded me of the volleyball I used to play, and outlet shopping in Maine. Although Sook Young’s clothes flattered me, they carried her physical memories. “I don’t want her shorts, Hank,” I told him, and left.

Standing on the sidewalk just outside the door to Hank’s building, I watched the people go by. It was late morning now, and well turned-out ladies were climbing out of taxis and paying for exorbitantly priced cups of tea in preparation for visiting Prada, Moschino, Issey Miyake, Max Mara. Two young women had painted their faces white with black lines like cracks down their cheeks. One was dressed like a doll in a pinafore and knee socks. She had ribbons in her hair and carried a basket. After a few moments along came a trio of girls in their early twenties who had clearly made their own clothes. The sun glinted off the shiny threads of the vibrant old kimonos they had cut up to fashion a pair of bell-bottomed pants, a dramatically long jacket, and a miniskirt with a bustle. Some of their hair blew around their necks, the rest was piled in stiff mounds and secured by traditional ornaments—spikes of metal topped with dangling butterflies and flowers in that characteristically Japanese combination of delicacy and danger.

Clearly there was a whole lot more room for imagination in my wardrobe. I had options I’d never considered. But I found I didn’t care. The adrenalin was draining out of my body, and the morning’s excitement was becoming a colorful snapshot I’d paste in my memory album with the caption: Not me at all.

Suddenly I missed Miller, with an ache I knew I didn’t have to question. I made my way across the wide sidewalk and hailed a cab, asking the driver to take me home. I only said home because I didn’t know how to tell him in Japanese to take me to the daycare center. I’d walk from the apartment. No, I’d run. I couldn’t wait to see my little boy. He’d be happy to see me, too. When we walked back to the apartment I’d carry him for a little while, and he’d probably pull my hair and say “Giddyup!” Giddyup I would. It wouldn’t matter what I was wearing. Miller liked my simple outfits just fine.