Pain: Fourth Grade Memory

One secret suggests an emotional distance I kept from my parents, even at a young age: I took money from my mother’s purse and bought things for Hitomi (not her real name).

I started to notice Hitomi when she sat two seats ahead of me in Miss Nakaue’s fourth grade class. First, I noticed her rich, dark hair that almost reached to her waist, clustered in natural curls. Sometimes it was pulled back into a ponytail or braids, adorned by a barrette or a ribbon. Admiring her hair from behind, I would picture Hitomi, sitting still in front of the mirror while her mother brushed it carefully every morning. She must have a box, I thought, which was filled with all kinds of hair accessories, from which her mother pondered the day’s selection.

Her hair looked far more feminine than my chin-length straight hair. Studying my own reflection in the mirror, I felt a twinge of sadness. My mother didn’t allow me to grow my hair long. “It would look messy,” she would say. Every month she spread out a large plastic sheet over the concrete floor of our small entrance hall and cut my hair. Draped in a cape, I sat still on a stool and watched my mother mercilessly clipped away at my hair.

One evening I pulled some sponge rollers out of my mother’s vanity and tried to add some curls to my short hair. My father saw me standing in front of the mirror with the pink rollers in my hair. His face flushed furiously. “You’re way too young to act like that!” He hit me in the face. I fell to the floor, bleeding from my nose.

But it was more than Hitomi’s hair that captured my attention. I admired the ease with which Hitomi smiled at others and made friends. Posing for a photo during a class trip, she didn’t hesitate to put an arm around another girl while I shyly stood in a corner. At her birthday party, her small apartment was filled with friends, who eagerly took turns singing for her. Behind a tower of gifts, Hitomi beamed in her purple dress with lacy collars. It didn’t matter to me that she was barely a C student who often failed to turn in her homework in time. It didn’t matter, either, that her mother smoked, face pale underneath thick foundation.

I was even captivated by the sound of her name; in English, Hitomi could be Tiffany, Brittany, Heather –one of those names that belong to soap opera characters. Kiyoko, on the other hand, sounded too plain, too old-fashioned like Susan or Nancy. No script writer would go out of her way to pick my name, especially for the main character.

I felt elated when Hitomi suggested that we walk home together after school. Her family lived in a three-story apartment building within a short walk from my house. That afternoon we detoured through a Shinto shrine on our way home. We washed our hands at the pavilion, proceeded to the sanctuary, clapped our hands, and bowed our heads solemnly. We had both grown up in typical Japanese homes where our parents proudly called themselves atheists but still burned incense sticks and pressed their palms together at the altar in our living room. Praying prevents bad things from happening, they would say. It was the concept of bachi (divine punishment) the Japanese had perpetuated for centuries.

After leaving the sanctuary, Hitomi and I sat on the stone steps by the entrance gate. She pulled two rice crackers out of her backpack and held one out toward me. “Who’s your favorite boy in our class?” She asked casually as she unwrapped her cracker. “I won’t tell anyone,” she assured me.

I whispered the name of a bespectacled boy, a member of the Ping-Pong Club, thin, pale, and easy to overlook. My eyes searched for Takashi Yanase, who played Ping-Pong in a corner of the school gym as my friends and I, members of the folk dance club, whirled on the stage every Tuesday afternoon.

The next morning Hitomi threatened me near the fish-shaped pond in the school grounds. “I’ll tell Mr. Yanase that you have a crush on him.” She grinned wickedly. “In fact, I’ll tell everyone. I’ll say, ‘Miss Kamio is in love with that Ping-Pong-playing boy!’”

Panic-stricken, I begged her to keep quiet. Until finally, she agreed as long as I would obey her commands. That weekend, she took me to a shopping mall, where I bought her a barrette trimmed with rhinestones.

“I’ve never seen such a pretty girl before,” exclaimed my mother when she first saw me coming home with Hitomi, a rosy-cheeked girl in a red corduroy skirt who smiled her irritatingly sweet smile at my mother. Hearing her praise her beauty, I felt on the verge of telling my mother about what was happening –on those afternoons when Hitomi and I strolled in the mall. At a records store, she would eye a cassette tape of her favorite singer and look at me encouragingly. I would rummage around in my purse for the wallet, take out my mother’s money, and buy it for her. “I’m thirsty,” she would say, turning toward me while leaving the store. We would stop in front of a vending machine, and I would buy her a can of orange juice.

A couple of weeks passed. Finally, I mustered up enough courage to share my problem with my teacher. One night I labored long to describe my torment in writing. When I sealed the thick envelope addressed to Miss Nakaue, a sense of relief washed through me. She would rescue me, I thought. When I arrived at school the next morning, I pulled the letter out of my backpack before heading for the teachers’ lounge. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hitomi march up right to me. I groaned inwardly.

Unable to contain her curiosity, she pointed to the envelope in my hand and said, “Is that a love letter or what?” I tried to ignore her. But perhaps I acted too defensively, clutching the envelope tightly. She grabbed the letter from me while I vigorously protested. She ripped open the envelope. As soon as she began to read it, she stiffened. “What’s this?” She said, looking up. My heart froze.

Fortunately, before she read any further, Miss Nakaue entered the classroom and announced the beginning of the homeroom period. I managed to take the letter from her. She took her seat reluctantly. We all stood up with our arms straight down to the side and bowed to Miss Nakaue. She took attendance and made announcements as usual before starting the algebra class. Even now, after a distance of all these years, I can picture myself sitting in that still and quiet classroom: steam rising from the stove in a corner, the January sunlight streaming in, Hitomi’s mohair sweater I gazed at from behind. I covered my face with my hands. I knew that at recess, Hitomi would demand that I hand the letter over to her.

After writing down some new formulas on the blackboard, Miss Nakaue passed out worksheets, told us to work on our own, and sat down at her desk. While my classmates labored over the problems, I looked at the clock alarmingly. The bell would ring for recess within half an hour.
I stood up and walked down the aisle toward Miss Nakaue, who was inspecting her fingernails. “I feel like I have a fever,” I blurted out. “Could I go to the nurse’s office?”

At the nurse’s office, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Mrs. Hamasaki, the school nurse, handed me a thermometer and stepped out of the room briefly to run an errand. The moment she left, I got up and held the thermometer to the stove. When the nurse returned and removed the thermometer from my armpit, it read 103.

I was sent home, sitting on back of the bicycle a school aid pedaled. I felt an enormous sense of relief. I took solace in the fact that I would be absent from school at least for a while. At home, too, I employed the same tactic: I held the thermometer close to a kotatsu (an electric foot-warmer underneath a table covered with quilt.) Then I happily lay in my futon, reading books. Until my mother discovered the tactic a couple of days later. “I thought something was strange!” She shouted.

The next morning I returned to the classroom. Hitomi demanded in her authoritative voice that I keep running around the school building during recess for the entire week. I obliged.

I desperately longed to feel someone’s protective embrace. I ached to scream my pain at her: Mother, this girl is hurting me. Mother, I’m terrified of going to school. But I held back the words, knowing my mother. She would call me a coward too fearful to confront a mean child, a liar who not only played hooky but also stole her mother’s money.

Even in kindergarten, I had already become somewhat of a stoic figure in my little brown uniform: one day, when a few other children and I were playing on a jungle gym, one girl pinched the palm of my hand so hard that it bled. At home, I didn’t utter a word about this, acting as if nothing had happened at all. At age five, I had already learned to conceal my inner turmoil and marshal my own strength.

Of course, I never considered confiding in my father, either. He was a corporate warrior too harried to take my unhappiness seriously. Every morning I stuffed my backpack and headed out the door, pretending that I was a confident, straight-A student. “Kiyoko does so well in school,” my mother would gush. But her words often reminded me of my unspoken anguish. I had never been the confident and articulate child my mother saw from a tranquil distance. In the midst of family, I had craved a sense of family. I had carried this sense of isolation forward into my adulthood.