Ms Ice Sandwich Page 2
ON THE THURSDAY right after the autumn school term starts, there are only morning classes, and the afternoon is emergency evacuation training for when in case there’s an earthquake or something, which means we have to gather in our walking groups and go home together that way. Everyone in a walking group is in different classes and different school years (we’re put in groups by how close our homes are to each other), so that the things everyone wants to talk about, and how fast they walk, and what they do when they’re walking are all over the place, so it takes about twice the time it usually does to get home.
The sixth graders are big and a little bit scary, the fifth graders act all important and sometimes get too rough; the first graders are little, which I guess is to be expected, but they’re kind of unsteady on their feet like nursery-school kids, and the square backpacks they’re wearing are so big on them it looks like they’re about to fall over backwards any moment. The second graders walk with their mouths open and you can’t tell what they’re thinking, but they look like they’re kind of grinning, and there’s one third grader who’s really noisy, she never stops singing this song she made up. And out of this strange bunch of kids walking home together, it’s only us fourth graders who are walking normally. Actually, I’m not sure what it means to walk normally, which is what I was just thinking about when something hits me on the back of my head and I nearly fall on my face. I’m shocked, and then I realize that someone’s done a nevermore on me and I turn back to see Tutti—the only person in the walking group from the same class as me.
“Nevermore!”
She’s about to hit me on the head a second time, so I run to the front of the line to get away. I can’t remember exactly when it got started, but if you see a crow you’re allowed to hit the person nearest to you on top of the head as hard as you like, and it’s not really a game or even much fun, so I don’t know what you’d call it, but anyway it’s this stupid pact that we made, supposedly, and it’s not even just my class, it’s been a thing for ages throughout the whole school, and I have no idea why. The rule is that you have to shout out nevermore, and the first person to say it is the one who gets to hit somebody. It’s crazy. And this so-called game or whatever, which at some point got named Nevermore, is what Tutti has just done to me, even though I never heard her say it.
“Nevermore!”
“You can’t keep saying it over and over.”
“I’m not just saying it over and over. There’s another crow now.”
So she hits me over the head again, and I have to fix my hat, which has fallen to one side over my eye, then I keep on walking, ignoring Tutti who keeps chanting nevermore, nevermore, and trying to hit me again.
One lunchtime, soon after all the classes were reshuffled, Tutti thought she could get away with secretly farting in the classroom, but she was really unlucky because there was either a misfire or an accident or whatever you call it, but she ended up making this huge noise and everyone knew she’d farted, and worse, there was a big commotion because somehow her fart had that exact stinky, overripe smell that strawberries have when they’re in a plastic box in the fridge, and suddenly the word Tutti-Frutti popped into my head, and without meaning to, I blurted it out. Everyone stopped and stared at me, and for a moment the whole room went dead quiet, and then everyone started shouting and laughing, and that was how Tutti got named Tutti. (By the way, Doo-Wop got his name the same way—from the sound of his fart. It’s terrible if you’re ever unlucky enough to fart at school.) For quite a while after that, Tutti acted like she had a big grudge against me, whenever our eyes met she glared at me like a mad dog, but it wasn’t long before she got used to it, and it became totally natural for everyone to call her Tutti, even the teacher was calling her Tutti, and by the time the end of spring term came around, no one remembered that the name had anything to do with her farting, and she was just Tutti. One day, quite a long time after the naming incident, I found myself alone with her and I said, I’m really sorry, I feel bad about giving you your name, but after a little bit, Tutti looked me in the eyes and said Oh well, never mind. And then she said how the name Tutti-Frutti made her seem foreign and different and that maybe she would try dyeing her hair blonde, and then she laughed hahaha.
For a while, I was hoping that she really would dye her hair blonde, but she never did. She kept on coming to school with her usual black hair in the same bob cut. Actually there’s a group of three girls in my class who dress in a way so that they stand out, and they dance together, but by dance I mean it’s not just playing around mimicking stuff in girls’ anime or what idol bands do, they do like serious dance. When other kids are going to a cram school after regular school, they go three times a week to a proper dance school, it’s somewhere far away that has a specialist instructor, and they sometimes have recitals and competitions and stuff. Those girls don’t fit in with other girls in our class, but not in the way Doo-Wop doesn’t fit in; all the girls in the class kind of look up to them—that kind of different. During recess, they’re hardly ever in the classroom (they’re in the toilets or the sixth-grade building—even though they’re not supposed to be). Doo-Wop and I never talk to these girls. It’s like there’s a barrier of barbed wire or something, except it’s invisible, that keeps us away from them. Well, it’s not as if we really have anything to say to them… The other day when we had to make a newspaper, we ended up in the same group, and they spent the whole time just talking to each other and putting fancy stickers on their notebooks, and then running off to the toilet maybe to look at themselves in the mirror; they didn’t contribute at all to the newspaper, but they’re not the sort of kids you can tell off for stuff like that, they’re too stuck-up, you know, kind of hard to get along with. The one girl who’s kind of their leader has her hair dyed almost completely blonde and it’s actually a pretty nice colour. But for some reason, I’m thinking how that blonde colour would look even prettier on Tutti. And so I’m always thinking how if Tutti dyed her hair blonde, it would be awesome, though I don’t know why I like the idea of it, but that’s how I feel. On the other hand, Tutti, no matter what she says, has had the same black hair and the exact same haircut since she was in first grade.
These days, even though it’s not Valentine’s Day or anything, the kids in class have been talking about who they like, and who likes who, and it all makes me feel kind of weird. Girls especially like talking about that kind of thing and they’re always making a big fuss about it. I don’t get how they can go on and on about all that stuff, it’s a mystery to me. I mean who likes who and all that, stuff about other people, you never know if it’s true or made-up, a lie—it’s all just gossip, I mean it’s not really interesting or fun at all, but there are even some boys who’re into talking about that stuff now, even though only last year they said they hated it. I don’t understand what’s happened to them. But whenever the kids in the class start gossiping like this, I notice Tutti always sneaks back to her seat and starts writing something in her notebook, and I like that about her; she’s not annoying like most girls, she’s kind of cool really… and she’s easy to talk to too.
On top of that, Tutti has a really unusual hobby. I heard that one of the rooms in her house is stuffed floor to ceiling with piles of movies, or rather DVDs, probably her dad’s, anyway they watch them all the time, and Tutti says they’re going to watch every single one of them, starting at one end of the room and working through to the other end. But these aren’t the kind of movies that you go and watch at the cinema during New Year’s or in the summer, you know, the usual movies for kids—anime and things like that. I think some of them are in English, and they have subtitles, anyway movies from foreign countries, and one day before school let out for summer we were walking home from school and Tutti was telling me about those movies, and then she says, What do you do after school?, but I didn’t have an answer, I didn’t know. (Well, if she asked me now, I could tell her that I go to the supermarket to see Ms Ice Sandwich—or maybe I wouldn’t tell h
er—but back then I didn’t use to do anything special.) So I decide, instead of trying to answer, I would just ask Tutti a question of my own. Yeah, about movies… Isn’t it boring to just sit and watch a whole movie all the way through? I say, and Tutti says, It’s really fun, and for a moment her eyes get this kind of twinkly light in them, and I see that black pupils can seem kind of white when they sparkle. And then Tutti says, Me and my dad have movie night once a week, it’s kind of like a family tradition, and you know, you want to come over sometime and watch with us? Your house is near mine, and we eat loads of popcorn and stuff, and then she went home. I thought that didn’t sound too bad, but I’d sometimes seen Tutti’s dad at holiday events or pounding mochi at New Year’s, and for some reason I didn’t like talking to him, but then soon after that it was summer and that’s as far as me and Tutti got to talking about movie night.
MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS, a home-helper comes to our house to give Grandma a bath and a massage. After school on days when I don’t have calligraphy lessons or when it’s raining, or between the time I come home from playing in the park and dinner time, I always go and sit in Grandma’s bedroom and do my homework or read a book, and on Mondays and Thursdays she always looks like she’s smiling a little bit, and she looks kind of happy. Of course, she can’t talk at all, but I’m sure she understands what I’m saying when I talk to her, because the corners of her eyes and her mouth move slightly and I’m sure she’s giving me a sign that she’s listening, and sometimes she even nods her head, for sure.
On that subject, there used to be time a while ago when I was interested in what part of a person’s face tells you whether they’re sad or happy, and there’s even a saying that the eyes speak like the mouth does, but different of course, so I thought that the eyes were supposed to hold some kind of secret, but that turned out to be false, because according to the results of my experiments it turns out that eyes don’t have those special powers at all. When I look in the mirror and cover my mouth and eyebrows with my hands, so that all I can see are my eyes, I can’t tell what emotion I’m feeling at all. I try pulling all sorts of faces but you can’t tell what kind of face it is from the eyes alone. My conclusion is that when it comes to the face, emotions are seventy per cent from the eyebrows and thirty per cent from the mouth. In the case of my grandma, she doesn’t have eyebrows any more, and no teeth either, and her mouth which is always a little bit open looks kind of like a dark little hole, but even so, I’m not sure how, I can always tell what Grandma is thinking. I look at the pattern of wrinkles on her face and the movement of her cheekbones and stare hard into her eyes, and these things reveal to me what Grandma is feeling. I don’t know how it is that I can tell but I do.
The only people in the whole world who know about Ms Ice Sandwich are me and Grandma. Whenever Mum goes into her salon and it doesn’t look like she’s going to be coming out anytime soon, or whenever all those ladies are over, I tell Grandma about Ms Ice Sandwich. And sometimes I sit at the low table in her room, which is actually a kotatsu table without the quilt covering, and draw pictures of Ms Ice Sandwich. I start by drawing the outline of her face, then the fringe part of her hair. Next, I draw a kind of nose. Then her mouth. And last of all, after I draw her two huge eyes, I colour the eyelids in bright blue, and right away it looks just like her, and I feel very pleased with myself and I make the noise mmm, like I’m satisfied. Then I stand up and step backwards so I can look at Ms Ice Sandwich from a little distance. The more you look at the drawing from this distance, the more it looks almost exactly like her. But I think of this as just a practice drawing, what you call a sketch. One day I want to paint a real picture of Ms Ice Sandwich. Use electric ice-blue paint and draw those enormous, totally awesome eyes. And her hard-working silver pincers. And her face that never smiles. Grandma mostly just lies there silently listening, but sometimes it’s like she smiles or nods. And this makes me happy, so I talk to Grandma about all kinds of things.
On the other hand, there isn’t really anything that I can talk about with my mum. We hardly ever eat dinner at the same time, because Mum doesn’t really eat dinner (and by the way she doesn’t even believe in having a microwave oven in our house). While I’m in the kitchen eating the dinner Mum has made me, she’s in Grandma’s room feeding her, and then after that we take turns having a bath, and finally right before we go to sleep on our futon arranged next to each other’s, we get to talk a little bit, and it’s been like that between us for a long time.
Mum told me a while back that the reason she doesn’t eat dinner is that the sweet taste of food is harmful to her spirit. When she doesn’t eat, her spirit has a chance to wash away its stains, kind of like moving to a higher level. Mum says all human beings have these things called spirit, and human beings can be divided into groups according to their spirit level; it’s kind of like they have a report card with number grades on it that tell you what level their spirit’s at, and Mum says when she meets somebody, just by doing one simple thing, she can tell right away, like a flash of light or something, the number that is their spirit level. What she does is, she checks the position and movement of the stars in the universe and she can tell people who are suffering from troubles in this world all about what is in their souls, and helps them go and live a happy life, and that’s her mission in life, she says. At about that point, I get it mixed up in my head and can’t follow what Mum is explaining to me, but that is the stuff that we talk about every night before we go to sleep. Mum likes to say, If I’m in a good mood and having fun, then it’s really good for the whole family, if I’m happy then you’re happy too, right? She’s always saying that, and I think, well, I suppose that’s true, but I can’t help feeling that sometimes maybe it’d be nice to talk about something else besides Mum’s work or Mum’s happiness. So the other night before we went to sleep I said to her, You know that story that has the dogs with the giant eyes? You used to read it to me when I was little? The one with the big dogs that are running? And Mum says, Where are they running to? And I say, I don’t know but I’m sure it was in a foreign country.
Mum, who’s sitting on her futon meditating as usual, opens her eyes and stares up into space for a while, it looks like she’s thinking quite hard about this. Hmm, I don’t remember that one. And I say, OK, but if you remember could you tell me the name of the story about the dogs, you know, with the really humungous eyes… And then I must have fallen asleep without realizing it, and when deep in the middle of the night I open my eyes and look at the futon next to me, Mum isn’t there.
HOW CAN SOMEONE yell like from deep down in their throat at someone they don’t even know? So loud the air starts to shake? What is it with some grown-ups whose whole body, their back, their forehead, their eyes, their hands get puffed up so much, until they explode? Just thinking about it makes me cringe. How could someone act so weird?
It happened on Monday, the busiest evening of the week at the supermarket. I was standing right behind this man, waiting my turn, in front of Ms Ice Sandwich’s glass case, watching her every move. Ms Ice Sandwich’s shop isn’t so popular that you always have to queue, but this day customers were lined up past the end of the glass case, beyond the meat counter, all the way to the eggs. The man looked ordinary and normal, like the kind of guy—there are loads of them around here—who you see out walking his dog, that kind of person. He was wearing a brown polo shirt and shorts and black sandals, and from what I could see, he might have been losing some hair on the top of his head. He was waiting for his turn in the queue just like everybody else as the sandwiches were sliding into their plastic bags, guided by Ms Ice Sandwich’s silver pincers. One by one the customers were passing in front of her after being handed a bag of whatever they’d bought.
Suddenly a man started yelling. I knew that it was the man in front of me who was yelling because I was right there next to him, but it happened without any warning and I couldn’t figure out who he could be yelling at. My heart began to go boom boom boom so loud that I was
sure everyone around me could hear it and my pulse took over my whole body, and I was trembling like jelly. I started gripping the edge of my trouser pockets and took a couple of steps backwards.
It’s Ms Ice Sandwich the man is yelling at. For a second there’s a buzz of voices and then everything goes quiet, and the neat queue dissolves and everyone’s crowding around the man and Ms Ice Sandwich, but instead of stopping yelling, the man gets louder and louder, his face turning purple, and I keep thinking he’s going to jump over the glass case or smash his fist down on it or something, he’s in such a state, shaking his finger at Ms Ice Sandwich, spit flying. What happened? I was right behind him, I didn’t see anything. It looks like everyone else has no idea either, they’ve all got very shocked expressions on their faces, watching the man. Two women next to me are so scared they’re grabbing hold of each other—they might be more freaked out than me.
The man doesn’t stop raving. And slowly I begin to figure out what he’s yelling about, he doesn’t like Ms Ice Sandwich’s attitude. He’s going on about the service industry and it’s a disgrace, your behaviour and answer me, dammit, say something! and why should I bother talking to you, go get your manager right away and wait, you should be responsible, I want to hear it from you, explain yourself, getting more and more worked up by the sound of his own voice, which is getting louder and louder.
And what does Ms Ice Sandwich do during all of this? She stands there, doesn’t say a word, stares at the man with her head to one side, her chin sticking out, arms folded—pincers in hand—she never moves a muscle. Those amazing ice-blue eyes, they aren’t exactly glaring at the man, just fixing him with a stare. She is flat like a picture. But her colours are even more vivid, more than usual, she looks exactly how a painting of Ms Ice Sandwich would look. Isn’t she afraid? She is the target of this man who’s losing it, who’s right in front of her, and she is just standing completely still, staring at him, not showing any fear. Me, right next to the action, I am scared out of my mind, how can Ms Ice Sandwich just stay there like that? She must have been standing on something on the other side of the glass case, a platform maybe, because Ms Ice Sandwich looks taller, like she’s looking down on the man, who is still ranting.