It Stays With You       

Does it look too Japanese? I ask Luisa, as I step out of the dressing room, wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt, half-priced at the Banana Republic outlet store. The dark blue material with  horizontal, white-spattered stripes reminds me of yukata fabric. It looks like a noren, she says, but not in a bad way. I imagine customers ducking under my arms for seats at the sushi bar. Irasshai! I want to cross the Pacific, eat and drink with my Honshu and Kyushu ancestors, but part of me is stuck in the California of my childhood. Trying to convince classmates I’m American too, insisting I don’t get fish cake with candles on my birthday, fake-laughing as Dierdre Munson—auburn hair, red plastic headband—throws back my valentine. After returning the shirt to the rack, then trying it on again, I buy it. Shibui, ne, I hear my dead mother’s approval. Goes well with your jeans.

costco

I head down a main aisle for the checkout with my dried figs, plantains, two 12-ounce containers of tumeric, and thirty rolls of Charmin. Catching up to an older man—green windbreaker, tonsure of white hair—I pull to the left to pass. Clang! He veers his cart into mine. Are we racing? he grumbles. Dumfounded, I steer past. There’s a lot of morons out there, he adds. Am I? Rushing from one errand to another, one meal, one load of laundry, one day, one year. Don’t get old, Mom always warned. Maybe someday I’ll be slamming my cage-like cart into others, or maybe I just won’t remember how fast it all went. Yesterday at the nursing home, my father-in-law couldn’t remember Queens, his wife, his lover, bringing his children to the U.S. No recuerdo. In lucid moments, he wonders why he can’t live with us. The cashier scan-guns my membership card. I tap my payment, join the long cart-check line at the exit.