“You’re finished.”
“I came to see you. What’s this all about?”
“Go home, Solomon! You’re just this little boy who wants to fuck. I need money, and this isn’t enough. What am I going to do?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go home and do your homework. Go have dinner with your daddy and granny! You’re all the same. I’m just a kid with divorced parents. You think I’m nothing. You think I’m a loser because my mother was the town whore.”
“What are you talking about? Why are you mad at me? I don’t think that, Hana. I could never think that. You can come over, too. I thought you were going to your mother’s restaurant after I left.”
Hana covered her breasts and went to the bathroom to get her robe. She returned, wearing a red yukata. She got really quiet, then told him to get more money and come back the next day.
“Hana, we are friends, nee? I love you. All the money I have, you can have. I have cash at home from my birthday presents, but my grandmother keeps it for me in her bureau. I can’t take it out all at once. What do you need it for?”
“I have to go, Solomon. I can’t stay here anymore. I have to be independent.”
“Why? No. You can’t go.”
Every day and night, he had been thinking of what he could do for work so they could live together. They were too young to marry, but he thought that after he graduated from high school, he could get a job and he could take care of her. He would marry her. Once, she had said that if she married, she would never divorce, because she could never do that to her children. Her brothers and she had been treated worse than lepers after her mother left, she’d said. But Solomon’s father wanted him to go to college in America. How could he leave her behind? He wondered if she would come with him. They could marry after he finished college.
“Solomon, I’m going to go to Tokyo and get a real life. I’m not going to stay in this apartment and wait for a fifteen-year-old to come and fuck me.”
“What?”
“I have to do something with my life. Yokohama is stupid, and I’d rather be dead than return to Hokkaido.”
“How about that school your mom found?”
“I can’t go to school. I’m not smart like you. I want to be on television, like those girls in the dramas, but I don’t know how to act. I can’t sing, either. I have a terrible voice.”
“Maybe you can learn how to act and sing. Aren’t there schools for that? Can’t we ask your mom to find you a school?”
Hana brightened for a moment, then looked disappointed again.
“She’d just think it’s foolish. She wouldn’t help me. Not for that. Besides, I can’t read well, and you have to be able to read your lines and memorize them. I saw this really good actress interviewed on TV, and she said that she works really hard at reading and memorizing. I’m not good at anything—except sex. But what do I do when I’m not pretty anymore?”
“You’ll always be beautiful, Hana.”
She laughed.
“No, dummy. Women lose their looks fast. My mother is looking old. She better keep your dad. She’s not going to do any better.”
“Can you work for your mom?”
“No, I’d rather die. I hate the smell of shoyu and oil in my hair. It’s disgusting. I can’t imagine bowing all day to lazy, fat customers who complain about nothing. She hates the customers, too. She’s a hypocrite.”
“Etsuko is not like that.”
“That’s because you don’t know her.”
Solomon stroked her hair, and Hana opened her robe and slipped off her panties.
“Can you do it now? Again?” she asked. “I need that thing inside me, you know? It’s always better the second time, because it lasts longer.”
Solomon touched her, and he could.
Every day, she asked for money, and every day he gave her some of his birthday money from the bureau until there was no more left. Whenever he came over, she wanted to try things, even when it hurt her a lot, because she told him that she needed to master this. Even if he didn’t like a certain method, she made him practice it and play certain roles. She learned how to make sounds and to talk the way girls talked in sex movies. A week after the money ran out, Solomon found a note she had hidden in his pencil case: “One day, you will find a really good girl, not someone like me. I promise. But it was fun, nee? I am your dirty flower, Soro-chan.” That afternoon, Solomon ran to Etsuko’s apartment, and he learned that she was gone. He didn’t see her again until three years later when she met him at a famous unagiya in Tokyo to give him a sweater before he went to college in New York.
15
New York, 1985
Where are you?” Solomon asked in Japanese. “Your mom doesn’t know where you are. Everyone’s worried.”
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Hana replied. “So you have a girlfriend-o now?”