Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz Page A

answer. “I went to a party at the house of my friend from MITI.”
    Her eyes widened. “Is that so? A party? What sort of party? Were there girls?”
    “It was a party to watch the summer fireworks,” he said slowly, piecing the backward grammatical constructions together in his head. “There were a lot of girls. Japanese girls.”
    Mrs. Hasegawa looked shocked. “Eh? Japanese girls? Do you like them? What did you talk about?”
    Alec felt inadequate in the face of her hunger for information. “I told them that they were beautiful and that I liked their clothes. One girl in a red dress, I asked her to dance, but her husband said that she couldn’t. His face was the same color as her dress.”
    “You should not ask a married woman to dance,” she said severely. “Japanese women are different from American women, you know.”
    “I have heard that, Hasegawa-san.”
    “Call me Mother.”
    “Mother,” Alec said softly.
    “That is very funny. What else did you say?”
    “Mother,” Alec repeated.
    She shook her head patiently. “No. At the party.”
    If he just lay on his back and closed his eyes, Alec found that the talking itself didn’t require a great deal of effort. “I told every girl I met that if I did not see her again, I would become very sick. I do not think they understood.” He opened his eyes, rolling his head to the side in order to see her expression.
    Mrs. Hasegawa looked severe again. She was making her favorite noise of disapproval: a loud clucking. Alec thought she sounded like a chicken. He almost laughed but stopped himself by turning over on his stomach, cradling his face in his arms.
    “There is a very important thing about Japan that you do not yet know, so I will tell you,” she said to his back. “Even though you are not very tall, you are handsome. You are not fat. Your family must be very important—it is a good family. So, you cannot have just any girl for a girlfriend; she must also be of good family, eh? Do you understand?”
    He heard the pouring sounds as she refilled his glass. “Yes, thank you. You are right,” he said, his voice muffled by his arms. “You are right.”
    There was a break in the conversation. Alec wondered if she had gone back to working on the account books. Mr. Hasegawa had inherited the family business of wholesaling fruits and vegetables to restaurants and supermarkets throughout the Tokyo area. It appeared that the business was thriving. An indigo Mercedes was parked in the garage of their narrow, four-story house. They had an extra bedroom. They ate mango and kiwi. Yet it seemed to Alec that, outside of these material rewards, all Mrs. Hasegawa really had to herself were the account books, which she spent at least an hour every night updating. They were her responsibility, not her husband’s. She chose to work on them late at night, when everyone else in her family had gone to bed. Alec wondered whether there was a kind of freedom in that routine—in the chance to have, for just an hour or two, a job and place of her own, free of her children and household chores.In that sense, the account books were more real to her than was her husband. Aside from meals, Alec had yet to see the two of them together. Mr. Hasegawa’s office was on the third floor of the house, and he could be found there at all hours of the day, unless he was at the low table, watching the baseball game on TV, his wife and daughter wordlessly serving him dinner.
    “Do you like Scotch?” Mrs. Hasegawa asked.
    Alec looked up. “What? Yes.”
    Slowly she stood up, walked into the kitchen. When she returned, she set a bottle of Scotch and two glasses with ice down on the low table. She mixed two drinks with a little water, handed one to him.
    “Kampai,”
she said.
    “Kampai.”
He took a sip of the strong drink.
    She sat down on the tatami again. “Sometimes I get very tired.”
    “You are always working, Mother.”
    “Working? No, I am not working. I am only taking care