Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [28]
Later, in the bedroom, when Frank was looking at Joey’s toys he picked up the red and yellow wooden spinning top – the paint now chipped and worn – and asked why Joey kept such a shabby old thing.
‘It’s from Japan,’ Joey said.
‘What’s that?’
‘A place. The other side of the ocean.’
‘So, what, your dad brought it home for you?’
‘No. I was there with him.’
‘You went to Japan?’
‘I was there already. That’s where my mom was.’ He could tell Frank was losing his way and added helpfully, ‘Nancy isn’t my real mom, she brought me back here from Nagasaki – from Japan.’
Nobody in Frank’s family had been outside the state, let alone the country; the idea of some place the other side of the ocean and an extra mother was beyond his understanding.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So the spinning top came from this . . .’
‘Japan.’
‘From there. Right.’ A pause. ‘So where’s your real mom now?’
‘She died,’ Joey said. That’s what they told him. He began suddenly to feel anxious. ‘I think I’m going to sleep now.’
Next day in the playground Frank and some of the class clustered in a corner, whispering. Joey, kicking a ball around, saw that the others were looking his way. Then Frank called him over.
‘You know you told me that stuff about your mom being dead and all . . .’
He could have just said he didn’t want to talk about it. But one of the girls told him it was sad, and he began to feel maybe he did want to talk about it. And then one of them said if his real mother came from a foreign place –
‘Japan,’ Joey said.
– then what was she called?
He should never have told them her name.
‘Butterfly? Butterfly? What kind of a name is that? Nobody’s mom is called Butterfly.’
In a moment everything changed: they stared at him, boredom pricked into alertness; indifference sharpened into curiosity.
Often he had dreamed of arousing their interest, finding himself at the centre of the group. Now it had happened and he wished himself elsewhere. He could have simply said his mother was dead, played the orphan. Too late now.
Perhaps if he had looked foreign, if he had exhibited signs of otherness, they would have been prepared, but here he was with the blue eyes, the yellow hair. American. It threw them.
They clustered round him, wanting to know more about this mother, about this woman with a name like no other, but what was there to tell? She was a girl. And then she married his dad.
And then?
The school bell rang, saving him.
She married my dad. And then?
He could have said her name was Cho-Cho, but something told him these kids would find that wasn’t even a word, let alone a name. He knew one or two of the others had families who came from faraway places: Germany, Sweden – there was a boy from France called John who had started out spelling his name Jean when he arrived, but at least Jean didn’t sound freakish when the teacher read it off the register; there were Americans called Gene. So Joey translated Cho-Cho into Butterfly. But nobody’s mom was called Butterfly.
He pressed his hands over his ears now, but through the roaring in his head he could hear Nancy calling from below: ‘Joey! Come down now. It’s your favourite cornmeal cake.’
He was seven and had disliked cornmeal cake for years.
12
Nancy’s father asked Ben, from time to time, how he was doing and he always replied, ‘I’m doing okay, Louis.’
He felt he had arrived at a precise and accurate assessment: he was keeping up the payments on the house; the business was building, slowly. Automobiles were the future, so his own future, and Nancy’s and the boy’s, would be secure. They were doing okay; they should be happy. He wished she smiled more; she used to smile easily and laugh, wrinkling her nose in a way he found sweetly arousing. But life rubs away at a person and after a while it seems harder