Read Online Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng - Free Book Online
Authors: Jennifer Tseng
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on occasion, to lift my hands from the wheel. And yet the word “wheel” misleads, for I was not driving but being driven. (Indeed I did not even have a driver’s license!) But by what or by whom? A boy in high school? The power differential be damned, whatever the force, I could not stop it. And why should I? No crime had yet been committed, not a single offense taken. My joy was everywhere evident.
Who dares to block joy’s tidal wave? Who if they try can stop it? But I defend myself, a useless exercise. Then it was like reading of love in a book. One feels the many pleasures without inflicting any pain. In the end, no one is hurt or saved but the solitary reader. When one closes the book, life resumes. The husband continues to irritate, the child continues to breathe heavily in her sleep, her skin persists in smelling like cake, her washed hair of flowers.
Prior to the young man, I had avoided my own reflection (unlike Maria who climbed and then sat for hours upon the dresser like a cat, luxuriating in the sight of herself, rapt with her own facial expressions, her own ability to move: a sly squinting of the eyes, a feline flicking of her tongue, the tart raising of her bare backside up in the air). Now I peered curiously into the mirror, I lingered in the moments during which I changed out of my white flannelette, a gown given to me by my chaste Aunt Tomoko. I gazed at the back of myself in particular, at once with a mother’s loving eye (I had become much less critical of the human form since becoming a mother) and with the shy yet avid eyes of the young man, recalling expressions I had seen upon his face across the counter. To my surprise, I, he, we, liked what we saw. I began indulging in daily showers, a habit I’d given up the day Maria was born. I primped myself like never before (not that I had a very impressive primping history) and felt an irrepressible sense of buoyancy during the hour before going to work.
More than ever, I read. I visited other libraries (another old habit revived), perhaps searching for the book that would inform me of what to do next, perhaps hoping to find that in one of these parallel universes, the young man still existed. There is a library in every town on this island. I fought the urge to borrow sensational nonfiction paperbacks pertaining to our situation, as well as reference books containing relevant laws and legal precedents. It was, I reasoned, too risky; no one understands better than a small-town librarian how little privacy borrowers possess.
I would wander the stacks of the strange library in search of nothing in particular, sometimes choosing a letter of the alphabet to guide me, sometimes a subject like dark matter or French cooking. There were days I chose a book because I liked or disliked the cover or because I liked or disliked the author’s name. Other days I would go straight to a beloved book and borrow the book that was to the immediate left or right of it. Books are not so different than people. Often the person across the room with whom you first lock eyes should be bypassed in favor of the quieter, less charismatic person standing next to them. What’s more, one’s longing for a stranger can be a longing for someone invisibly connected to that stranger.
As if to practice understanding said stranger, I began reading books in translation. Like a schoolgirl for whom passion is a novelty, I read love stories. I read more than one book in which a pair of lovers meets for the first time on a train. In one, translated from the Greek, the two encounter one another on a commuter train. Daily they observe one another until at last one morning they speak. In another, translated from the Spanish, a man is traveling cross-continent and for several hours he observes intently a woman sleeping across from him. How I envied these lovers their proximity to one another, their being at liberty to observe!
Then again, had the young man and I met on a train, I might have
Who dares to block joy’s tidal wave? Who if they try can stop it? But I defend myself, a useless exercise. Then it was like reading of love in a book. One feels the many pleasures without inflicting any pain. In the end, no one is hurt or saved but the solitary reader. When one closes the book, life resumes. The husband continues to irritate, the child continues to breathe heavily in her sleep, her skin persists in smelling like cake, her washed hair of flowers.
Prior to the young man, I had avoided my own reflection (unlike Maria who climbed and then sat for hours upon the dresser like a cat, luxuriating in the sight of herself, rapt with her own facial expressions, her own ability to move: a sly squinting of the eyes, a feline flicking of her tongue, the tart raising of her bare backside up in the air). Now I peered curiously into the mirror, I lingered in the moments during which I changed out of my white flannelette, a gown given to me by my chaste Aunt Tomoko. I gazed at the back of myself in particular, at once with a mother’s loving eye (I had become much less critical of the human form since becoming a mother) and with the shy yet avid eyes of the young man, recalling expressions I had seen upon his face across the counter. To my surprise, I, he, we, liked what we saw. I began indulging in daily showers, a habit I’d given up the day Maria was born. I primped myself like never before (not that I had a very impressive primping history) and felt an irrepressible sense of buoyancy during the hour before going to work.
More than ever, I read. I visited other libraries (another old habit revived), perhaps searching for the book that would inform me of what to do next, perhaps hoping to find that in one of these parallel universes, the young man still existed. There is a library in every town on this island. I fought the urge to borrow sensational nonfiction paperbacks pertaining to our situation, as well as reference books containing relevant laws and legal precedents. It was, I reasoned, too risky; no one understands better than a small-town librarian how little privacy borrowers possess.
I would wander the stacks of the strange library in search of nothing in particular, sometimes choosing a letter of the alphabet to guide me, sometimes a subject like dark matter or French cooking. There were days I chose a book because I liked or disliked the cover or because I liked or disliked the author’s name. Other days I would go straight to a beloved book and borrow the book that was to the immediate left or right of it. Books are not so different than people. Often the person across the room with whom you first lock eyes should be bypassed in favor of the quieter, less charismatic person standing next to them. What’s more, one’s longing for a stranger can be a longing for someone invisibly connected to that stranger.
As if to practice understanding said stranger, I began reading books in translation. Like a schoolgirl for whom passion is a novelty, I read love stories. I read more than one book in which a pair of lovers meets for the first time on a train. In one, translated from the Greek, the two encounter one another on a commuter train. Daily they observe one another until at last one morning they speak. In another, translated from the Spanish, a man is traveling cross-continent and for several hours he observes intently a woman sleeping across from him. How I envied these lovers their proximity to one another, their being at liberty to observe!
Then again, had the young man and I met on a train, I might have
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