An Isolated Study of Wives and Women
by Isabel Zhu
Her entire life is a failed experiment. Narumi is a foreigner among foreigners aboard this plane. Glances from older passengers, observing her spectacle, drive her eyes to the floor. She’s an American mutation of them, with voluminously permed hair and balloon-like shoulders on her blouse. The 80s are all about colour, like the bright pink blush on her cheeks, but everything is tinged grey in here. The late July heat makes it harder to breathe in this inherently asphyxiating plane—maybe it’s just her lungs. They’re all going to Japan, her homeland; though at this point, "home" is debatable.
When she was a child, Narumi's father always said, “marriage is the best success for a girl”. “Success” meant never needing to return home. Everything he had, he spent on her education; there was nothing more he could give her. Narumi knew this, so she did as told, and married three months after she finished university. Better yet, she married a man who imminently needed to leave the country and return to his home country of Norway. She dreamed of settling down, and starting a new life.
Then plans changed. Oslo became Montreal, then Berlin, then finally New Jersey. Narumi followed wherever he went, bound in holy matrimony. “A good woman is loyal,” her father said.
What would her father think now?
Carol Prynne herds her sons out the front door through clenched teeth. Her three boys get on the school bus. It’s their last day of school, late in June, the morning shrouded in humid haze and filled with the constant hum of cicadas. An exasperated wave from their mother sends them on their way. Once the bus is out of sight, Carol fumbles for a cigarette, lights it, and takes a seat. She can't sit around though, despite it being her forty-sixth birthday. Carol is late for work again. All the divorce paperwork kept her up late again last night, and she wonders if the freedom will even be worth it. Doing everything by herself isn't easy.
Right across the street from Miss Prynne’s house, Narumi stands on her tiptoes and kisses Jan before he gets into the new Camaro. She ruffles his dirty blonde hair, silky soft, and hands him his lunch box. He is still as handsome as the day they met back in Kyoto. Now that he’s an associate professor of psychology at Princeton, they’re here to stay. As he backs the shiny blue car out of the driveway, she looks to the white picket fence and mailbox with THE KRISTIANSENS in fluorescent red paint.
Her days are lonely, especially since Jan decided to teach summer classes, but Jan tells her that some things make up for not having any friends.
“Look about you!” he says. “We have money here. We have our own house. We are happy.” He always cups her face between his hands when he reminds her of this. “Now, tell me you love me.”
“I love you” sounds much better than “Jeg elsker deg”. She still thinks “Watashi wa, anata o aishiteimasu” is the most beautiful, but she keeps quiet about it. Jan tells Narumi they live the American Dream.
Every variation of “I know” and “won’t happen again” spills from Carol when she finally arrives at ShopRite. The manager mutters under his breath. Half an hour later, she’s only managed to scan half of Mrs. Northam’s groceries before needing assistance at checkout 7. He says something about how the $3.35 an hour he pays her is excessive for the service she provides. Every penny is a waste for him. Carol would quit, but she needs every cent.
When Narumi started grocery shopping here, she’d always get some looks. Sometimes confusion, sometimes anger. These died down when people got used to her, and it made life a lot easier. Today, she runs into Rosemary Ramirez from down the street, her baby bump proudly on display.
“Hi, Naomi, how are you?”
Narumi, now Naomi, warily smiles at Rosemary. It’s hard for her eyes not to dart between Rosemary’s face and the bump, like talking to two people instead of one. She invites Naomi to her baby shower. They’ve lived on the same street for a while, so it’s only right that Naomi joins the community. Naomi accepts.
Rosemary’s heels click against the laminate tiles of the store, and her feathered black hair bounces gracefully. There’s only a hint of her Spanish accent when she talks, and her delicately rolled R’s are stylish, not embarrassing. She matches her eyeshadow, teal, to the rest of her outfit. How is she even pregnant? Seeing Rosemary’s stomach makes Narumi nervous. Her own body, in comparison, is like a child’s: flat as a board and boy-like. Rosemary is exactly what men want, especially in America.
Narumi places her groceries on Carol's checkout. Rosemary winces as she watches poor, naive Naomi at Carol’s checkout. She clearly doesn’t know about Carol; what happened with Joe Taylor, and later Rob Greenspan, possibly even David Levine. Greenspan and Taylor had both been married for less than two years; Mr. Levine’s wife had just given him twins, too. Narumi bags her groceries. She waves goodbye to Rosemary, consciously avoiding the bump. Miss Prynne and Mrs. Ramirez seemed oddly tense at checkout, she thinks.
“Kodomo ga hoshī?”
Jan puts down his book and takes off his big, gold-rimmed glasses.
“Remember what we said? Snakke norsk eller engelsk. You need practice in both languages.” He flips between the two so smoothly, they might as well be the same language.
“Sorry.” She pauses to find the words. “Do you want kids? All other women here having babies.”
“ ‘Have babies,’ ” Jan corrects, a mistake Narumi makes all the time and still does not fix.
He looks at the framed diplomas on the wall. His PhD, Master’s, and Narumi’s engineering degree from Kyodai.
“Maybe in a few years. Now’s not the time, min kjære.”
He kisses Narumi on the forehead. She smiles until he picks up his book again.
Carol gets home from night school at 10 pm, exhausted but alert. The boys are thankfully in bed. She picks the phone up off the receiver, twirling the cord between her fingers.
“Hello?”
“Is she there?”
He pauses for a moment. “No. I’m coming over right now.”
Around midnight, Narumi watches from the bedroom window. A man whose face she vaguely recognizes leaves Carol’s house out the side door, his footsteps the only sound throughout the suburban street. On her porch, the ember of Carol’s cigarette flickers like a lighthouse on a cliff’s edge. A disgusting habit, Narumi thinks. Jan tells her to come back to bed. She wraps her arms around his back until he rolls over and kisses her. He wants more, and Narumi does too, but she tells him to stop. What’s the point? Real men want real women, who they want to have children with; like Rosemary or Carol. She doesn’t know how to articulate this though. Jan sighs, and Narumi turns off the light.
At the baby shower, Naomi receives a barrage of questions. Yes, she’s really only twenty-five. Oh, Jan is almost forty. The women learn how to properly pronounce the J in Jan. No, she doesn’t work; Jan makes enough money and her father said she never needed to. No, kids aren’t in the picture for them yet—Jan is far too busy. Another box of wine empties. She laughs at how she says “three” and words that start with the letter “S” with the other women. Her accent is rather silly, isn’t it? By the end of the party, Naomi is the most popular woman on the block.
Carol watches Rosemary and Naomi together in aisle 4. When they stop talking and look over, Carol knows she's caught. Catching Rosemary’s gaze is a dangerous thing to do these days. She sees Rosemary lead Naomi into another aisle, and when they reemerge, Naomi has a different look on her face. It lacks that youthful innocence. It’s almost fearful.
Incense burns next to a framed picture of Narumi’s father on the fourth of July. She cries for him like a child. Jan does what he can; he cooks and keeps the house running, but Narumi can tell he’s exhausted by her grief. She would call Rosie, but she’s too busy with the new baby girl. None of the other women answer her calls, bored with novel Naomi.
Narumi’s eyes habitually dart to the clock when the door to their home opens and shuts. Jan leaves at 8:30 on Monday, and comes home at 6. On Friday night, she asks why it gets as late as 10:30 before he gets home. Why wouldn’t he call? He thought she wouldn’t answer, he says, so he didn’t. When he gets home, his jacket stinks of tobacco. But Narumi doesn’t say anything. It would only make things worse. She peers from her window as Carol takes her trash out. Narumi has been awake for so long, five days last time she checked, that she doesn’t even feel tired anymore.
The portable radio plays as Carol cleans. The windows are open to air out the smell of teenage boys in the midst of their workout craze. It’s a beautiful day today; men mow lawns, their white tennis shoes staining green, and women push strollers and walk dogs.
Narumi looks out from the front window and hears all the laughter and the music and from across the street. Everyone here is so fucking happy all the time. No one does anything about that slut across the street. How can they live here knowing that all their husbands are at risk? A shiver of exhaustion runs through her.
That Hall & Oates song Carol likes fades into that annoying Olivia Newton-John track. In the break between the songs, there’s a knock on the door. Carol resists the urge to walk to the beat of the song as she gets the door.
“Oh, Naomi, what can I d—”
“That’s not my fucking name, you whore.”
I'm saying all the things that I know you'll like / Making good conversation / I gotta handle you just right / You know what I mean…
Professor Kristiansen stands in front of three hundred juniors in a lecture hall.
“When we talk about masculinity, we cannot leave our female counterpart out of the picture. Masculine ideals impact women as much as they impact men. Our ideas of femininity and masculinity go hand-in-hand."
There's nothing left to talk about / Unless it's horizontally!
Neither of them knows how they end up on the lawn. The eyes of everyone along the boulevard fix upon the two women, scuffling in the grass. Scratching, hair pulling, and venomous words; a return to basal bloodlust on display.
“You steal my husband, you ruin the lives of everyone here, stupid American woman—”
“I didn’t sleep with your fucking husband!”
“The relationship between women and men is changing—” Professor Kristiansen says. “Women seek out higher education much more than thirty years ago. It’s more common for women to support themselves. That does not mean they remain untouched by masculine ideals. Male ideals inadvertently complicate relationships between women, too.”
Let's get physical, physical/ I wanna get physical / Let's get into physical / Let me hear your body talk / Body talk…
Rosemary watches in horror as Narumi pins Carol to the ground, then spits in her face.
Let's get physical, physical / I wanna get physical / Let's get into physical / Let me hear your body talk / Body talk…
Mr. Ramirez runs across the street and wrestles Narumi off the older woman. Blood streams from Narumi’s nose onto her baby-doll collar blouse.
Let's get animal, animal / I wanna get animal / Let's get into animal! / Let me hear your body talk / Let me hear your body talk
Carol's mouth swells with the taste of liquid metal. As Narumi tries to escape his grip, she does a double take at Mr. Ramirez’s features; she’s seen them once before, slinking shamefully off Carol’s porch late at night.
Rosemary can see the rings around Narumi's eyes from down the street as Mr. Ramirez drags her off his lover, and across the road.
She pretends to be asleep when Jan gets home. He comes straight upstairs and turns on the lights, blinding Narumi momentarily. She sits up in bed, only daring to glance at him.
“What the fuck did you do?”
Carol hears the shouting through open windows that summer night. Never thought Jan could cut that deep, she thinks. “Unhinged", “embarrassment”, “pathetic”, “disgusting”, “insane”; all these words thrown around too easily. Carol goes to bed after she hears the crack of an open palm on a cheek. She remembers why she divorced her husband. Her own cheek burns familiarly.
In the morning, Jan loads a large suitcase into the trunk of the car. Narumi walks over to the car door, but stops before getting in. It's only temporary, it's only temporary. Carol stands on her porch, still smoking despite her bruised lips. Narumi looks across the street.
Narumi’s father echoes in her mind "Lonely women die alone."
Carol packs the boys into the back of the car. It only took a week to sell the house—talk about a getaway. They wave goodbye to the “SOLD” sign on the lawn. The grass is still patchy.
As the plane makes a rough landing, he taunts her again.
"Successful women never return."
“The concept of loyalty to one thing: a person, or a country, is an outdated idea. A confining one.” Professor Kristiansen paces back and forth as he lectures. “It assumes fundamental differences between each person on the basis of biological sex, race—things all dictated by genetics. In fact, we are all the same —men, children, wives, and women.”
The girl who always sits in the front row smiles at him. He smiles back, knowing she’ll be here after class.
“We are isolated creatures, loyal to no one.”