Read Online A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki - Free Book Online
Authors: Ruth Ozeki
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we’d both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.
“You look real nice, Nao,” he’d say, staring over my head.
And I’d study my shoes and say, “Yeah, you’re looking good, too, Dad.”
We were totally lying, but it was okay, and we walked the rest of the way not saying anything, because if we even opened our mouths after telling such big lies, the truth might come pouring out,
so we had to keep our lips shut. But even if we couldn’t talk frankly to each other, I still liked it that my Dad walked me to school every morning, because it meant that the kids
couldn’t start picking on me until after he’d waved goodbye and turned the corner.
But they were waiting. I could feel their eyes on us as we stood by the gate, and the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck started to prickle, and my heart started beating real fast, and my
armpits were like rivers flooding. I wanted to cling to my dad and beg him not to go, but I knew I couldn’t do that.
“Ja, ne,” my dad would say, brightly. “Study hard, okay?”
And I’d just nod because I knew that if I tried to speak I would start crying.
4.
The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or
a baby gazelle? They come in from all sides and cut the most pathetic animal off from the herd and surround it, getting closer and closer and staying real tight, and if Dad had happened to turn
around to wave to me, it would have looked like good-natured fun, like I had lots of fun friends, gathering around me, singing out greetings in terrible English—Guddo moningu, dear Transfer
Student Yasutani! Hello! Hello!—and Dad would have been reassured to see me so popular and everyone making an effort to be nice to me. And it’s usually one hyena, not always the biggest
one, but one that’s small and quick and mean, who lunges first, breaking flesh and drawing blood, which is the signal for the rest of the pack to attack, so that by the time we got through
the doors of the school, I was usually covered with fresh cuts and pinching bruises, and my uniform was all untucked with new little tears in it made by the sharp points of nail scissors that the
girls kept in their pencil cases to trim their split ends. Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and then eat them alive.
Basically, it went on like that all day. They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai! 36 or Bimbo
kusai! 37 Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu
show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea. My strategy was basically just to ignore them or
play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. I thought that maybe if I just pretended hard enough it would actually come true, and I would either die or disappear. Or at least it would come true
enough for my classmates to believe it and stop tormenting me, but they didn’t. They didn’t stop until they’d chased me home to our apartment, and I ran up the stairs and locked
the door behind me, panting and bleeding from lots of little places like under my arms or between my legs where the cuts wouldn’t show.
Mom was almost never at home at the time. She was into her jellyfish phase, and she used to spend all day at the invertebrate tank in the city aquarium, where she would sit, clutching her old
Gucci handbag, watching kurage 38 through the glass. I know this because she took me there once. It was the only thing that relaxed her. She had read
somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read the same article, so it was always
crowded in front of the tank, and
“You look real nice, Nao,” he’d say, staring over my head.
And I’d study my shoes and say, “Yeah, you’re looking good, too, Dad.”
We were totally lying, but it was okay, and we walked the rest of the way not saying anything, because if we even opened our mouths after telling such big lies, the truth might come pouring out,
so we had to keep our lips shut. But even if we couldn’t talk frankly to each other, I still liked it that my Dad walked me to school every morning, because it meant that the kids
couldn’t start picking on me until after he’d waved goodbye and turned the corner.
But they were waiting. I could feel their eyes on us as we stood by the gate, and the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck started to prickle, and my heart started beating real fast, and my
armpits were like rivers flooding. I wanted to cling to my dad and beg him not to go, but I knew I couldn’t do that.
“Ja, ne,” my dad would say, brightly. “Study hard, okay?”
And I’d just nod because I knew that if I tried to speak I would start crying.
4.
The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or
a baby gazelle? They come in from all sides and cut the most pathetic animal off from the herd and surround it, getting closer and closer and staying real tight, and if Dad had happened to turn
around to wave to me, it would have looked like good-natured fun, like I had lots of fun friends, gathering around me, singing out greetings in terrible English—Guddo moningu, dear Transfer
Student Yasutani! Hello! Hello!—and Dad would have been reassured to see me so popular and everyone making an effort to be nice to me. And it’s usually one hyena, not always the biggest
one, but one that’s small and quick and mean, who lunges first, breaking flesh and drawing blood, which is the signal for the rest of the pack to attack, so that by the time we got through
the doors of the school, I was usually covered with fresh cuts and pinching bruises, and my uniform was all untucked with new little tears in it made by the sharp points of nail scissors that the
girls kept in their pencil cases to trim their split ends. Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and then eat them alive.
Basically, it went on like that all day. They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai! 36 or Bimbo
kusai! 37 Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu
show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea. My strategy was basically just to ignore them or
play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. I thought that maybe if I just pretended hard enough it would actually come true, and I would either die or disappear. Or at least it would come true
enough for my classmates to believe it and stop tormenting me, but they didn’t. They didn’t stop until they’d chased me home to our apartment, and I ran up the stairs and locked
the door behind me, panting and bleeding from lots of little places like under my arms or between my legs where the cuts wouldn’t show.
Mom was almost never at home at the time. She was into her jellyfish phase, and she used to spend all day at the invertebrate tank in the city aquarium, where she would sit, clutching her old
Gucci handbag, watching kurage 38 through the glass. I know this because she took me there once. It was the only thing that relaxed her. She had read
somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read the same article, so it was always
crowded in front of the tank, and
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