If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous Page B

dangerous.”
    â€œHaruki doesn’t act like a crow,” I point out.
    â€œNo,” he agrees. “He acts like a rice cooker. Outside he looks like nothing happening. But inside becomes more and more hot.”
    As we enter the freshman secretarial classroom, I’m sure the girls can smell my feet, which are clammy in my plastic hoof slippers. I’m sure they are ogling the grille marks on my thigh, wondering why I chose to put my big bare legs on display. “Hello,” I call out and they giggle as usual. I start to pass out my gender worksheet and Miyoshi-sensei says, “Maybe we had better use the textbook to discuss cultural issues.”
    â€œBut I didn’t plan my lesson using the textbook,” I protest.
    â€œDon’t worry,” he says. “I will steer the discussion.”
    New Horizons teaches English through a serialized comic strip. International pals Yumi, Ken, and Pablo get in and out of trouble, all the while conversing in “the new global language: English!” Yumi’s uncle is a rogue scientist. In the last chapter, the three friends boarded his unfinished time machine. Rascally Ken pushed “the big red button,” and off they soared into the dark night sky, landing on the moon one text box later.
    â€œRepeat after Miss Marina,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “From the moon, the earth looks like a blue and white ball.” Only the most earnest girls mumble after me. The rest stare out the window orglance at the compact mirrors propped open on their desks. “Let’s go home,” says Yumi, and the friends climb back into the spaceship. They streak through the sky, but something goes terribly wrong and the time machine touches down on a smoking trashscape. A banner declares the year 2030.
    â€œOh Ken, look at all this trash!” I read for Yumi.
    â€œLook at Pablo,” Miyoshi-sensei reads for Ken. “He looks sad!”
    â€œOf course he’s sad. The earth looks like a trash bin!”
    Looks like , Miyoshi-sensei writes on the board. Look at. He/she looks…
    â€œMiss Marina,” he says, “I think now is good time to discuss American culture.”
    â€œGreat,” I say, gathering the stack of magazine pictures from the podium.
    â€œActually,” he says, “I think maybe students are more interested to learn about American gomi situation. Could you please tell about the dump? Maybe we couldn’t imagine such a place.”
    In our team-teaching Miyoshi-sensei likes me to expose the problems of the Western world. I have learned that it doesn’t pay to get defensive, or to admit to how much I don’t know. I’ve begun improvising, making things up.
    â€œAmerica is a big country,” I say, opening my arms wide. “We have so much space, we don’t need to separate gomi into a million categories. We don’t burn trash, or dig through our neighbors’ garbage cans. We put our trash in big black bags that we leave on the street at night, and early in the morning a professional takes everything to the dump and we never have to see it again.”
    â€œI’m afraid dump sounds so ugly,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “Like New Horizons picture of 2030. If I go to USA, can I be dump tourist?”
    â€œYou can’t see the trash,” I say. “It gets buried in giant holes called landfills.” This actually sounds true.
    â€œYou are from San Francisco,” he says. “You have many earthquake there. When the earth is unstable, you can’t dig a hole for trash.”
    â€œWe just throw it in the middle of the ocean.”
    He turns to the board and draws an astonishingly accurate map of the United States. Next to it he draws a Japan that’s almost the same size. Between the two he sketches wavy blue lines. “One sea,” he says. “Same sea.”
    â€œAnd here in Shika, the mill pours dye into the river. What’s the