The Electrical Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

cookies,” I offered, eagerly reaching for my sweater on a nearby chair.
    “No, no,” Chisako said quickly, pinching my forearm as if I were a child who’d unknowingly done something to be punished. She grimaced as she released my arm, then her smile returned. “Let them go on. They have their secrets. You remember what it was like at that age.” We watched them as they crossed, Tam’s strides carrying him a little farther with each step, Kimi half running to keep up.
    “Look at them,” Chisako said, folding her arms under her breasts. “So chiisai, ne? So insignificant. They must be the shortest in their class.” She did not try to hide the disgust in her voice. She disappeared into my bathroom for several minutes, emerging as her old elegant self, her face evenly powdered. She thanked me many times, and apologized for her outburst. “I’m urusai, I know. Don’t mind me.”
    “No, no,” I said, “not urusai, no bother at all. Never.”
    At the door she bowed dowdily, avoiding my eyes.
    As I recall, the afternoon light fell on Eiji’s portrait in a particular way after Chisako left that day. His smile there, his arm flopped over the armchair in our Port Dover living-room, long ago, before we left Vancouver Island and the sea that he loved. Before everything. He might have just turned sixteen. As I looked into his face, he called to me with his smile. Asa-chan. The sound of my name—no one else ever said it that way, not Mama, not Papa, not Stum. It brought feeling into my heart for Chisako.
    I greeted her eagerly on the street the next time I saw her,anxious to show my sympathy. She was just stepping off the bus. I searched her face for signs of distress. “Chisako, genki?”
    “Yes, yes, I’m fine, thank you, Saito-san,” she replied brusquely, amid the squawk of the departing bus. Her eyes flitted over my coat, my drab coat that could hardly have been to her taste. “Specials on ika and sashimi downtown,” she said with a cold smile at the ground, adjusting her many shopping bags. “Very fresh today.” She murmured something else too: a hasty goodbye, I thought, but she did not leave. I looked away too, out to the field, to the giants, Chisako’s cages—the electrical towers. How people could have it in their heads to build such hideous things was beyond me; on that afternoon they reminded me of giant ika, standing in the field with their long squid legs. I edged away, nearly bumping into a woman—a big-boned hakujin woman in a kerchief passing at that moment. I recognized her as Keiko Nakamura’s next-door neighbour. “Hello ladies,” she said, her hand with its large knuckles tugging delicately at the kerchief, and we answered in unison, sounding sweet and obedient. She and Chisako exchanged a smile. Chiisai, we’re chiisai, I thought, so small, so insignificant, like Tam and Kimi. I saw my house in the distance, the porch light I’d left on by mistake tunnelling into my eyes in bright daylight. Flashing a message of my loneliness. But Chisako was beautiful, I saw that again, like a newly discovered fact. She was beautiful in anyone’s eyes. A wife, a mother. With bags of groceries for her family. “Saito-san,” she started to say, but by then I’d moved away, to cross the field for home, and even as I saw she was hurt it was too late. I called out something about getting back to Papa. Getting backbecause I could not endure myself in her presence for one second longer.
    “Ne-san!” It was Stum, staring at me, concerned. In his little-boy moments that was what I was, his ne-san, his older sister. But I saw myself in his eyes, slumped back on the chesterfield, looking lost.
    “Nani?”
    “It’s Papa. Something’s wrong.” I listened but it was unusually quiet, no whine or hum from upstairs. When I stood up, my knee buckled, still asleep.
    “What happened?” I followed Stum up the stairs.
    “He made a funny noise, and then …” His untucked shirt-tail flapped at the back,