At the service entrance, I flash my ID card from the employment agency and the guard nods gruffly. It's depressing in the back, with boxes and wet sheets of plastic and bits of vegetable littering the floor. The fluorescent lights are dim. I wander through the store with the bag that holds my equipment, looking for the best place to set up. Today, I chose a spot between the meat counter and the frozen-food cases.
First, I made a stand by stacking some boxes from the storeroom. Then I covered it with a floral-print tablecloth and set out a plate. I put crackers on the plate, took my beater from the bag, and began whipping the cream.
The noise of the beater echoes through the empty store, and I always feel a little embarrassed. I concentrate on whipping the cream, ignoring the looks from the employees gathered around their registers for the morning meeting.
The store had just been renovated, so the floor was spotless and everything seemed to shine. I spooned little dabs of whipped cream onto the crackers and offered them to customers as they passed by. I always repeat the sales pitch exactly as it's printed in the manual from the agency. "Please try some. It's on sale today. What could be better with your favorite homemade cake?" I rarely say anything else.
All sorts of people passed by my stand—a lady in sandals, a young man in a sweat suit, a Filipino woman with frizzy hair. Some of them took a cracker from my plate and ate it. Some walked by with a skeptical look, and others put a carton of cream into their basket without saying anything. I gave them all the same smile. My salary has nothing to do with how many cartons I sell, so it seems easiest to be pleasant to everyone.
The first person to take a cracker today was an old woman with a bent back. She had what appeared to be a towel wrapped around her neck like a scarf, and a brown cloth purse in her hand. She was an ordinary old lady, almost invisible in the crowded supermarket.
"May I try one?" she said, coming up timidly to my table.
"Please do," I said, in my most cheerful voice.
She stared at the plate for a moment, as if she were examining some rare delicacy. Then she extended her dry, powdery fingers ever so slowly and took a cracker. The next motion, however, was amazingly quick. Her lips came open in a childish circle and she tossed the cracker into her mouth. As she bit down on it, her eyes closed appreciatively.
We stood there in the supermarket, surrounded by an infinite variety of food—behind her, stacks of meat in slices, cubes, or ground; behind me, frozen beans and piecrusts and dumplings. The tall shelves were packed tight from one wall to the other, and each shelf was overflowing with food: vegetables, dairy, sweets, spices—it seemed to go on forever. I felt dizzy just looking at it.
The shoppers passed by, baskets in hand, as if bobbing along on a stream of groceries. It occurred to me that almost everything in the store was edible, and this seemed a bit sinister. There was something disturbing about so many people converging on this one spot in search of food. And then I remembered my sister, and the way her sad eyes stared at a tiny morsel of croissant, how she seemed about to cry as she swallowed and the white crumbs scattered forlornly across the table.
As the old woman had opened her mouth to eat the cracker, I caught just a glimpse of her tongue. It was a brilliant red—in startling contrast to her pale, fragile body. Her throat was illuminated for just an instant, as the grainy surface caught the light. The whipped cream slid smoothly over her tongue and out of sight.
"Would you mind if I had another?" she said. As she bent over my plate, her purse swung back and forth in her hand. It was rare for anyone to ask for a second cracker, and I hesitated for a moment. But I caught myself almost immediately.
"Of course," I said, smiling back at her. She took another cracker in her wrinkled fingers and tossed it into her mouth, and again her crimson tongue peeked out from between her teeth. She seemed to have a healthy appetite, and there was a certain rhythm and energy to the way she ate.
"Thank you," she said, putting a container of cream in her basket.
"Thank you," I said, wondering what she would do with it when she got home. She turned, and a moment later she had disappeared into the crowd.
APRIL 16 (THURSDAY), 21 WEEKS + 3 DAYS
My sister put on a maternity dress for the first time today. Her belly suddenly seemed larger, but when she let me touch it, I could tell that it hadn't changed. I found it difficult to believe that there was a living being there under my hand. She seemed to be having a hard time getting used to the dress and kept fiddling with the ribbon around her waist.
But her morning sickness has vanished, ending just as abruptly as it began. Since the nausea started, she'd avoided the kitchen completely, so I was puzzled when I found her leaning against the counter this morning, after saying good-bye to her husband.
Because we haven't been cooking, the kitchen was spotless. Every utensil had been put away, the counter was clean and dry, and the dishwasher was empty. It seemed cold and forbidding, like a showroom. She looked around for a moment and then sat down at the table. Normally, it would have been cluttered with bottles and containers we'd forgotten to put away, but today there was nothing on it. She looked up at me as if she had something to say. The hem of her dress swirled around her ankles.
"Would you like a croissant?" I said, trying to be as discreet as possible.
"Please don't even say that horrible word," she said. I nodded obediently. "But I would like to try something else," she continued, almost whispering.
"Sure," I said. I hurried to the refrigerator, realizing that this was the first time in weeks that she'd expressed any interest in food. But there was absolutely nothing there, just a bare lightbulb illuminating the emptiness. I closed the door with a sigh and went to look in the pantry, but there was nothing there, either.
"Don't you have anything?" she said, sounding worried.
"Let's see," I said, sorting through the bags and cans and jars. "There's a little gelatin, half a sack of flour, some dried mushrooms, red food coloring, yeast, vanilla extract . . ." I came across two leftover croissants, but I quickly put them back.
"But I want to eat something," she said, as if making a momentous decision.
"Hold on. There must be something around here." I checked the pantry again, shelf by shelf. At the very bottom, I found some raisins we'd once bought for a cake. The date on the box said that they were more than two years old, and they were as dried out as a mummy's eyeballs. "How about these?" I asked, pushing the bag toward her. She nodded.
It was strange to watch her eat something so hard with such a satisfied expression. Her jaw worked quickly as she took handful after handful from the bag. Her whole mind and body seemed to be concentrated on eating. When she came to the last few raisins, she let them rest on her palm for a moment, studying them lovingly before slowly putting them in her mouth. That was when I understood that her morning sickness was truly gone.
MAY 1 (FRIDAY), 23 WEEKS + 4 DAYS
In the past ten days my sister has gained back the ten pounds she lost during fourteen weeks of morning sickness. Now she seems to have something edible in her hand at every waking moment. If she's not at the table for a meal, she's clutching a bag of pastries, or looking for the can opener, or poking around in the refrigerator. It's as if her whole being had been swallowed up by her appetite.
She eats all the time, almost as a reflex, like breathing. Her eyes are clear and expressionless, fixed somewhere off in space. Her lips move vigorously, like the thighs of a sprinter. But for me very little has changed; it's just like when she was sick all the time—all I can do is sit back and watch.
She suddenly has an appetite for all sorts of strange things. One rainy night she announced that she was dying for loquat sherbet. It was raining so hard that the yard seemed to be hidden behind a curtain of white spray, and it was very late. We were all in our pajamas. It seemed unlikely that any store in the neighborhood would be open, not to mention the fact that I wasn't even sure there was such a thing as loquat sherbet.
"I want loquat sherbet," she said. "Gold and icy, like the pulp of the fruit frozen into tiny crystals."
"I'm not sure we'll find it tonight," said my brother-in-law, as nicely as he could. "But I'll try in the morning."
"No. I want it now. My head feels like it's full of loquats—I'll never get to sleep unless I have it." Her tone was deadly serious. I sat down on the couch, my back to the two of them.
"Does it have to be loquat? They might have orange or lemon at the convenience store." My brother-in-law had found the car keys.
"Are you really going out in this rain?" I called to him, unable to hide my amazement.
"It has to be loquat," she said, ignoring me. "I can practically taste it . . . but it's not really for me. . . ."
Her husband put his arm around her shoulder. "Why don't you take one of those pills Dr. Nikaido gave you and try to get some sleep?" he said, fiddling distractedly with the keys. There was something irritating about the way he kept glancing at her as he spoke.
MAY 16 (SATURDAY), 25 WEEKS + 5 DAYS
Sometimes I think about my sister's relationship with her husband—particularly about his role in the pregnancy, if he ever had one.
When she's having one of her crises, he looks at her timidly and stammers meaningless little phrases meant to comfort her, but in the end all he can do is put his arm around her. Then he gets this sweet expression, as though he's sure that's all she really wanted anyway.
I knew that he was a bit dull the first time I met him. It was at the dentist's office. My sister had never brought him home while they were dating, or even after they got engaged; but when I got a cavity, she suggested I go to his office.
A talkative, middle-aged woman worked on my teeth, and when she found out I was related to the fiancée of one of their employees, she asked me all about my sister. At the end of every question, I had to close my mouth, which was full of saliva, and come up with an answer. It was exhausting.
When it came time to make a mold of my teeth for a crown, he appeared through a door at the back of the examination room. Since his job was to make bridgework, he wore a white coat that was shorter than the ones worn by the dentists. He was a bit thinner back then, his hair a little longer. As he came up to me and muttered some standard greeting, I realized how nervous he was. His voice was muffled under his mask. Trapped as I was in the dentist's chair, I had no idea how to return the greeting, so I just turned my head toward him and nodded.
"If you'll allow me then," he said, with exaggerated politeness, bending down over me. The tooth in question was at the very back, so I had to open my mouth as wide as possible. He brought his face close to mine and stuck his hand in my mouth to feel around the root of the tooth. His fingers were damp and smelled of disinfectant. I could hear him breathing through the mask.
The dentist moved over to work on the patient in the next chair. Her cheerful voice rang out over the motor of the drill.
"Your teeth are a beautiful color," he murmured to me. I had no idea teeth came in different colors, but with his hand in my mouth, I couldn't ask what he meant. "And so straight," he added. "Your gums are healthy, too—firm and pink." I wasn't sure why he felt the need to give a running commentary on the state of my mouth; I certainly didn't need to have someone describe my teeth and gums in such detail.
My face was warm from the large light above my head. Needlelike drills and larger ones with diamond-shaped bits were lined up on the table next to me. A stream of water spilled into the silver gargling basin attached to the chair.
After the examination, he sat down on a stool and took a small glass plate from a cart. He sprinkled a mound of bright pink powder on the plate and poured a few drops of liquid on the powder. Then he mixed it vigorously with a tiny spatula. The string that held his mask swung back and forth behind his head, and his eyes darted restlessly between my mouth, my chart, and the glass plate.
As I watched the pink powder thicken, I wondered to myself whether this poor man, wrapped in his mask and his white jacket, was really going to marry my sister. "Marry" didn't seem to be quite right, so I tried other ways of putting it—"live with" or "love" or "sleep with my sister"—but none of these seemed right, either. He continued to grind away at the plate, apparently oblivious to the terrible noise that the spatula made against the glass.
At last the powder congealed into a malleable pink mass. He pinched it between his fingers and, using his other hand to hold open my mouth, smeared it over my molar. It was cold and tasteless against my tongue. As the tip of his finger ran over the inside of my mouth, I fought the urge to bite down with all my might.
MAY 28 (THURSDAY), 27 WEEKS + 3 DAYS
The more my sister eats, the more her belly grows. The swelling starts just below her breasts and continues down to her lower abdomen. When she let me touch it, I was surprised at how hard it was. And it isn't perfectly symmetrical; it lists slightly to one side. That, too, was something of a shock.
"This is about the time that the eyelids separate," she told me. "If the fetus is a boy, the genitals are starting to descend from the abdominal cavity." Her tone, as she described the baby, was cool. And there was something disturbing about the words she used— "fetus," "genitals," "abdominal cavity"—something that seemed inappropriate for an expectant mother. As I watched her belly, I wondered whether the chromosomes in there were normal, whether the cocoons were wriggling somewhere deep inside her.
There was a little accident at the supermarket where I was working today. One of the stock boys slipped on a piece of lettuce and broke a whole cart full of eggs. It happened right next to where I was doing my demonstration, so I saw it all at close range. There were broken eggs and slimy smears of yellow all over the floor. The tread mark from the boy's sneaker was still visible on the lettuce leaf. And several cartons landed in the fruit section, covering the apples and melons and bananas with dripping egg white.
After the accident, the manager gave me a big bag of grapefruits that he said he couldn't sell, and I was happy to take them home since there never seems to be enough food at our house these days. When I put them out on the table in the kitchen, I noticed that they still smelled slightly of egg. They were big yellow grapefruits, imported from America, and I decided to make them into jam.
It was hard work peeling them all and getting the fruit out of the sections. My sister and her husband had gone out for Chinese food. Night was falling, and the house was silent except for the occasional tapping of the knife against the pot, a grapefruit rolling across the table, or my quiet cough. My fingers were sticky from the juice. The light in the kitchen illuminated the grainy pattern of the fruit. The grapefruits became even shinier when the sugar I had sprinkled on them dissolved. I dropped the pretty, crescent-shaped sections into a pot, one after another.
The thick rinds strewn across the table were somehow comical. I cut the pith away and shredded the zest before dropping it into the pot. Yellow juice spurted everywhere, covering the knife, the cutting board, my hands. The zest, too, had a neat, regular pattern, like a human membrane seen under a microscope.
Finally, I turned on the stove and sat down to rest. The sound of simmering grapefruit drifted out into the night. Clouds of sour steam billowed from the pot. As I watched the fruit dissolve, I remembered a meeting that some fellow students had dragged me to a few months earlier. The title of the program was "Pollution: Our Earth, Our Bodies." There weren't many people there, but they seemed a sincere little group. As an outsider, I sat at a desk in the corner and stared out the window at a row of poplars lining the quadrangle.
A thin woman wearing old-fashioned glasses made a presentation about acid rain, and then there were several complicated questions. As I pretended to listen, I fidgeted with the pamphlet they had handed to me on the way in. On the first page, there was a picture of an American grapefruit with a caption in bold print: "Beware of imported fruit! Antifungal PWH is highly carcinogenic and has been shown to destroy human chromosomes!" The caption came back to
me now in the kitchen.