The Mask Carver's Son by Alyson Richman Page A

hardened by the wood he embraces day after day.
    *   *   *
    On her wedding night, my mother waited anxiously for my father to join her in their connubial futon. She lay stiff, the virgin bride tucked neatly under the red silk blanket. Grandmother had embroidered the futon’s overlay with large white cranes, and mother, her eyes shut tightly and her fists clenched at her sides, wished more than anything that the silken cranes would take flight and carry her far away.
    Father, however, had spent nearly an hour soaking in the
o-furo
in what proved to be a futile attempt to calm his nerves. Exhausted from the wedding, and overwhelmed by the crowds of guests, he sought the peace and tranquillity of the bathhouse. To be sure, he knew that his wife waited for him. Her elaborate wedding robe was already folded and she was now elegantly dressed in a delicate
yukata
. Her skin smelled sweet from the almond blossom balm, her lips painted into a demure expression. She waited. Like a lovely bundled-up
furoshiki
waiting to be untied.
    He had never been with a woman before. His only memory of a naked woman was that of his aunt. He had seen her shriveled body when she disrobed before bathing with the wooden pail in the outer yard of the old house. Her spindly backbone protruded from her flesh like the snaking spine of a scaled fish. Her breasts, deflated with age, hung like the weak teats of an animal. When she poured the water over her head, letting it cascade in a huge torrent over her whole form, her hair adhered to the blades of her shoulders like a black wig threaded with long strips of seaweed.
    He knew his wife would be different. He had studied her face, much as he studied the planes of a mask. Her porcelain-smooth complexion, the slight elevation of her cheekbones, he already knew her features by heart. With ease he could imagine her narrow eyes rimmed in black kohl, the brow bone white and high. Had he a block of wood in front of him, he could carve her from memory. He would begin with the nose. Long and distinctively arched. Not flat like most. He would carve away both the right and left sides of the wood until it rose from the center like a small triangle. Then he would move on to her mouth. He pictured her lips blossoming into a full pout. Red like a poppy. Smooth like a single petal. In his momentary wandering of the mind, he transcended time. It was only when he discovered himself in steaming water up to his neck, the steam rising over his face, that he awakened.
    He gathered himself slowly. The heat had made him lethargic, yet he knew he must go to his bride. She would be waiting for him. He wrapped himself in an indigo-dyed
yukata
and pushed his red feet into his rope-coiled sandals. The stars in the evening sky were white and dangled above him like
shimenawa
, the strips of rice paper one knots to mark the most sacred places.
    When he walked to the tatami room where his bride lay, he discovered her not exactly as he had imagined. Fearing in her loneliness that her new husband had rejected her, Mother had begun crying. Her once impeccably powdered face was now streaked with red blotches. The rice powder had clumped like glue around the basins of her eye sockets, and her lips were swollen beyond the line of her lip rouge. Seeing his face looking down at her sent her seeking refuge in the sleeve of her
yukata
.
    Father knew that what his master had forbidden him was now rising in his chest. Emotion swam inside him, choking him like a salty wave. Indeed, the face he now saw before him was definitely not a mask. Yet the faint noise of weeping and the sweep of milky leg protruding from the slit of her robe reminded him of his mother. He knelt beside her and stroked her arm as if it were the rarest column of wood. He traced the blue of her veins running like the current of a river underneath the skin, branching into thin spiders at the delta of her wrist.
    She turned to him, half her face imprinted with the texture of