Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

As you can probably tell from the execution, I wouldn’t say this was exactly a planned attempt. More a total shit fit that fortunately nobody saw, a physical manifestation of the screaming inside my head that sometimes gets so loud I want to drill a hole in my skull.

It was naive of me, to think that expressing your distaste for something means you can resist all the forces of family and society that propel you toward it.

And he never heard that what I was really saying was “I miss you, I need you, don’t go and leave me alone.” And since he never heard it, I stopped saying it, and now I just clean the kitchen and have a cigarette and turn the other way when I go to bed.

Sometimes the days last forever, and still the weeks and months and years go whizzing unstoppably by.

So now if an earthquake causes the roof of her classroom to fall in, I can at least be comforted by the thought that my daughter looks trendy.

In hindsight, I was gorgeous. I realize that’s generally considered an indefensible thing to say, but I am just stating an objective fact. I can give you a list of my faults as long as my arm, and yours, with categories for sub-faults and spider diagrams of talents I don’t possess and things I can’t do. But it just so happens that, when I was younger, physical imperfection wasn’t on that list. Luminous skin, straight nose, long eyelashes, all my angles and curves pleasing to the eye. Fortunately, all the other twisted knots of my personality kept me from enjoying it too much;

She is probably never going to have sex ever again, I find myself thinking. What the hell is wrong with me? She is a lovely, warm, geriatric lady who stopped to talk to my four-year-old, and I am thinking about sex. But another part of my brain is already calculating how many more years I’ve got before I’m as old as she is, and whether or not it’s really going to be okay to spend them all being celibate,

I read somewhere that the twenty identifiable traits on the Hare psychopathy checklist apparently don’t count in children, since they tend to display all of them. These include poor behavioral controls, irresponsibility, superficial charm, parasitic lifestyle, need for stimulation, lack of realistic long-term goals, and impulsivity. I suppose it’s unsurprising that one might question things sometimes, being in a state of indentured servitude to two small psychopaths.

There are Friday nights when, just as I’m about to fall asleep, I remember that tomorrow I can be with Aki and Eri all day long, and it’s like the feeling I used to have before my birthday when I was small.

I wasn’t going to fall for him, obviously, because it was too much. Where was the bullshit, the mind-fuckery that made relationships so exciting and traumatic?

There are no words, in the face of his curled lip, to explain exactly what he has no idea about. No idea about the minutiae of his children’s lives, no idea how lonely folding another clean shirt can feel.

I’m aware of the argument that Medea-style shrieking is hardly likely to win him over, but apart from the fact that at this juncture I don’t give a shit whether or not Tatsuya finds my behavior winsome, proponents of this view are gravely missing the point. Their suggested fix is to be the perfect wife, to endear myself to him so that he starts behaving like a loving husband again of his own accord, and then we can sail happily into the sunset together. Well, I do not fucking think so.

So I wanted revenge on Tatsu. Of course I did. Far more than the time I found out he’d slept with some client of his. To be honest, there was a massive part of me then that wanted to hear all the salacious details, but ultimately that didn’t seem like the appropriate reaction. But this. He’s made me invisible. With all the options I had, I chose him, chose him for life, for living, and he’s frozen me out into an existence that isn’t living at all. I’m in a cage without bars and I’m screaming but nobody can hear. I’m not even middle-aged yet and he’s faded me into the background.

school’s-out holiday spirits of the end of the working day.

“Women don’t always have to be refined,” I say,

and looking at their tightly packed, brightly colored little bento boxes and thinking what a competent, brilliant mother I am.

Having a functional marriage is easy, it turns out. “Have a lovely day!” I call after him as he leaves. You just have to pretend you’re in an advertisement. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before.

I’ll tell you a couple of things about that first night that I knew, really, but pretended I didn’t. The way he was the first person in years who thought about the answers to the questions I asked him and looked right at me when he replied. And the way I knew exactly where in my chest my heart was, every time he said my name.

While I always meant to become a mother, I didn’t set out to become a housewife. I suppose that by the time I became a wife, a the kanji, reading “inside () the house (),” meant it was inevitable; that it was written, in fact. Especially since I now had a , a husband, or a “main () person ().” A protagonist in my life, and I wasn’t it. Some days I can’t quite work out how I got here; I opted for the guy, I opted for the kids, I just didn’t realize that meant waving goodbye to everything else.

Because what else am I fit for now? A calcified geriatric by Japanese employment standards, where even new graduates are considered too set in their ways to be the ideal employee.

I hadn’t gone to New York, let’s be honest, a lot of outlandish ideas concerning my own freedom, equality, and happiness would probably never have occurred to me and, arguably, I might have been happier and considered myself more free and more equal. Perhaps.

I wonder now what decisions he made to keep our tiny family afloat, what inevitable sacrifices there were. Why a heart attack—was it just the makeup of his body and too much MSG, or was it because, secretly, it all stressed the hell out of him, being the sole breadwinner and the only one in charge? Did he want to give it all up and feel he couldn’t?

Nobody seemed to mind very much about the considerable holes in whatever curriculum we were meant to be studying, but focused a lot more on the filler, a sort of Glee-flavored gel, where the buzzwords were “self-esteem” and “expression” and “happiness.”

I was hooked, and the life I was meant to return to was totally screwed. Screwed because I wasn’t the daughter my parents had said goodbye to, and my hometown itched like a hair shirt. Screwed because I hadn’t quite been keeping up with my kanji and Japanese studies, and when I got back—not unlike the protagonist of the folk story who comes back from the land under the sea to find that a hundred years have passed—I found that my one year abroad had been sufficient to turn me into a combination of village idiot and foreign weirdo.

Cassie announced she was going to marry a hedge fund manager we’d agreed was a real drag the first time she slept with him accidentally.

I look nearly the same as I do now, just happier. What an unforgivable thing to say, when my life now is the way it is. Maybe not happier exactly, just as if my edges haven’t been so finely polished. Less demure, less taut. Freer.

and I busy myself studying the coffee menu, pointing out the brilliant Japanglish in what may or may not be considered a series of racist jokes. Do they count if you belong to the race you’re ripping into?

Inoué-gate, when the married minister of finance was caught in a passionate embrace with the lead actress of the national 8:00 a.m. television series, leading to her having to make a televised apology and him continuing as if nothing had happened.

I’d go, “I’m a mother with a husband who works hard and a nice apartment, but I feel oddly dissatisfied,” and the therapist, who would inevitably be male, and older than me, would go, “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. Have you considered getting a grip?”

I like the idea, and I find the talks relaxing, but if I think about it too much, the idea of self-acceptance jars. Some people, surely, are unacceptable, and the makers of the recordings don’t know if I’m one of those people or not. How do they know if I phone my mother regularly, or separate my recycling, or keep my terrace free of furniture that could fly away in a typhoon, or tell the truth? You can accept yourself, here, but only if you’re fulfilling your obligation to society. I guess that’s why America is the land of the free, but we have lower crime rates and litter-free streets.

We just had an untenable amount of fun together, so superior in our invincibility and our youth, unaware that our superiority only came from the fact that we hadn’t had time to fuck things up too much yet.

You can screw someone no problem as long as all you see is their shell, and you show them yours, all painted pretty, and then you have some fun dinners and a few decent fucks and that’s the end of that. But if you get to know somebody, and find out you laugh at the same things and share strange tics; if it gets so good you only need to catch his eye to know what he’s thinking, you are, it is blindingly clear, totally screwed.

Having a secret makes me feel like nobody owns me, and that any opinion of me could always be inaccurate; no one has the whole picture, so it’s like trying to judge somebody’s appearance from a shard of broken mirror.

“I’ve always felt that being a mother would be a fulltime job in itself,” Tamao says carefully. “It would be very difficult to commit yourself to two jobs. There’s a lot of traveling involved in my line of work. I think that, to do it properly, women can probably only do one or the other, don’t you?”

“That’s true,” says Tamao smoothly. “They do lots of things differently in the West.” Which is almost always code for “and not as well as we do.”

The truth, the absolute truth, is that I’m glad he used that tone of voice.

There’s no word from Kiyoshi that day, which is of no consequence. Or all of the next day, and everything is fine because I’m not a fifteen-year-old and I don’t check my phone every thirty seconds or suffer from arrhythmia just because a strange man has kissed me.

I would be hard-pressed, though, to explain why, on receiving a message in the evening from a number saved under “Ichiko” that asks if I want to go to Nakameguro to see the blossoms on Monday, I have to go into the bathroom to do a little victory dance, and then peer at my reflection in the mirror because I look so damn happy.

“That would be me,” I lament. “I’d be worrying that I’d look like a dick if I ran away too fast, so I’d stay and die instead.” He gives me an incredulous look, our linked hands now a matter of fact. “Well, maybe fix that,” he suggests. “Don’t die rather than look like a dick.” “That’s reasonable advice,” I agree, and he squeezes my hand. “What about you?” But I know the answer. “I’d get out, clearly,” he states with confidence. “Whose definition of ‘dick’ is it anyway?

We exist like two blind fish, sliding past each other cordially in our parallel universes. It’s a great solution.

Maybe in all those years of happy marriage, Tatsu thought that Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when the fault lines started to appear.

What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people?

the thought of something so small and bright believing that being a cog in this tightly programmed machine is the only option for the future makes Tatsu’s enormous office claustrophobic.

“Mama,” Aki says from where he is busy running his fingers through an artificial waterfall. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a fireman. Or maybe a Power Ranger.”

“They’re shocked by everything.” We’re still whispering. “Most things I say make them do that rabbit-in-the-headlights-sharp-intake-of-breath thing.” “What do you say to the poor people?” “Oh, you know. Very shocking things. That sometimes I’m over making bento and I wish Aki had school lunches already. Once, that I couldn’t find a bikini I liked and did they know any nice swimsuit shops. I thought they were going to die.”

Legitimate sex nearly always takes place in the evening.

But my deciding to be with Kiyoshi wouldn’t make anyone happy. Not really. Not leaving the children, or bringing them with me and breaking their life; not the look on Tatsu’s face that I’d never be able to forget; not wondering always, always, if I made the right decision or if I didn’t and I’m selfish and I fucked everything up.

Now, when I remember what I wanted before I met Kiyoshi, I think it was just to start over, to do it all again for the first time, or maybe not do it at all. To have a clean slate. To be somebody else. But then there would be no Aki, no Eri, and life doesn’t work like that, does it? So I’m not leaving Tatsu for Kiyoshi, because that might be love, maybe, but it isn’t happiness, not for me or for anybody else.

“We should never have had them, Mizu.” “Why not?” I don’t know why the question comes out sounding so sharp. “They’re too squishy, and the world is too harsh.” He sits up. “Squishy Eri, and squishy Aki.” He pats my leg through the covers. “If we’d never had them, nobody could ever hurt them.”

When I was pregnant with Eri and feeling pretty chipper about the situation, a mother with three children sighed and told me as if I would understand, “The whole thing is heartbreaking.”