I want a normal life / just like a newborn child
Sooner or Later
Sachiko had thought that her daily challenge had been and gone. Dealing with a peptic ulcer lashing out at her by way of her esophagus had seemed enough trouble for at least one twenty-four hour period to her, though she’d never complain about it, and she wasn’t in any mood to further strain herself in that hot parking lot, where the air was thick enough to suffocate somebody who wasn’t used to it (though to those who were, it seemed little more than one of those little annoyances that never quite goes away—comparable perhaps to unkempt sidewalks after a snowy day). She was, in fact, tired. She wanted to go on a drive, yes, but she wanted to relax, too. Or at least not have to strain herself again.
That, it seemed, was not in the cards quite yet, however, for their new challenge approached them almost as soon as their decision had been reached: How to fit every member of their group into Sei’s tiny Volkswagen Beetle? None of them, as far as Sachiko knew, had anywhere else to be, after all, and Yumi and Yoshino were willing to leave none of them behind, even if only to wait for a ride. After all, what good would such careless driving do if you had to confirm your every turn with the driver behind you? She supposed that originally, none of them had particularly thought about the size of Sei’s car as being an issue—they had all expected that a car which was suitable for joyriding would be able to fit any number of people, in only mild discomfort.
It never occurred to Sachiko that she was, perhaps, overthinking the entire thing, the entire endeavor of joyriding.
Sei was the first to notice the problem, though it didn’t appear to be, to her, problematic so much as one more source of amusement, as everything else seemed to be to her (in Sachiko’s eye, anyway). She said it in an offhand sort of way, as they all started to make their way towards the car: “If Yoshino is getting the front, I suppose that means that the rest of you ought to be very comfortable with each other, huh? It almost makes me want to let Rei drive.” She said it with a lopsided, strangely charming smile. A moment later, still walking, she dug into her pocket and produced a small key ring with a single key and a remote on it. It was the latter that she fiddled with for a moment, until something blipped not far off. A second time, and Sachiko’s eyes became drawn to the car, and her mind became drawn to the problem: Sei’s car was a bug. A beetle. A tiny little car that probably couldn’t suit more than four, in Sachiko’s mind, let alone seven. None of the others commented on it for whatever reason—whatever reason being, unbeknownst to Sachiko, that they had already spent one screaming, gorge-rising, rubber-burning drive inside of it, cramped together, and the thought of another didn’t seem too awful.
To Sachiko, it seemed a deal-breaker. How could we possibly fit that many people inside such a small car? It seemed almost like a physical impossibility, the exclusive property of clowns and midgets the world over.
At this, Yumi began to flush a bit, and Sachiko wondered a bit at her. Her face was a bit reminiscent of how it was when she was deep in thought, but there was something else to it this time—a wideness of her eyes, an unusual straightness to her posture, so much so that it seemed for a moment that Yumi might bend backwards. “How…how do you think we should double up?” she asked Sei. Double up bounced off of Sachiko’s eardrums in the way that a word in another language might bounce off of a casual speaker’s ear, so she didn’t think much on it—had she, she might have been significantly less surprised that Yumi had asked Sei instead of Yoshino, or Shimako, or even Sachiko herself.
Sei smiled back at Yumi and winked. “I think that’s up to you kids to decide. I’m just the chauffeur, you know?”
The whole thing was entirely unintelligible to Sachiko, who had grown up riding in spacious sedans and limousines. But why did she ask Sei? Sei, of all people.
Yumi looked to Shimako, who only smiled, her expression entirely unreadable; she looked to Rei, who shrugged a mite helplessly, with an exasperation that only the old should have been able to feel with the young. Finally, she looked at Sachiko, who smiled at her, entirely baffled by this point.
“Onee-sama,” she said, nearly tripping over her own tongue, “would you like to…if it’s okay with you…I mean,” she stopped, and pulled in a deep breath, drawing her hands towards her stomach, to clasp directly over her belly-button—a trick Sachiko had taught her one day before she had had to give a speech for the Yamayurikai.
If you feel yourself losing your composure, take in one single deep breath, she’d said, and stop whatever it was you were saying. To cover this, simply give a smile and do not respond to any questions or murmurs from your audience—and Yumi was, indeed, smiling, and Sachiko had an idea that Yumi wouldn’t budge that expression if Sei had declared her intent to marry her in that instant—and clasp your hands over your stomach. Like this, yes, as though you were singing an opera. Let your breath out, and then begin speaking again, keeping your hands clasped firmly. Whenever you feel unconfident, after that, simply tug at your hands rather than engaging in a stutter or nervous habit, and remember: You have ensnared your audience such that they were unable to budge you even though you fell silent for a full ten seconds, with no reason.
She had taught this to Yumi kindly, but in a voice that had seemed a bit odd to her—her voice had actually been slightly lower as she spoke. More like her mother’s. She thought that maybe it had just been a symptom of a cold or some other such trivial nonsense at the time. Now, perhaps, she knew better.
Yumi exhaled, and Sachiko brought her attention back to the girl, who had not, it appeared, been fazed by the sudden relative silence. Even the background noise—the constant, seemingly inescapable hum of traffic, of the birds, of the insects—seemed to fade for a moment.
Then she spoke.
“Sachiko-onee-sama,” she said, her voice now clear and true, “if you like、would you please consider doubling up with me for our ride?” She kept her eyes firmly fixed somewhere between Sachiko’s breasts and her jawbone as she spoke--the only hint she provided as to how nervous she actually was.
Sachiko smiled at her, the reality of what she was being asked to do still not striking home—to her, it was still just an odd foreign word, some verb that she perhaps had not picked up properly over the course of her English instruction. “Of course I will,” she said with that same grin. Her promise had the same validity as if it’d been made for her by somebody else entirely—a promise made while intoxicated, or perhaps while uninformed. She might have thought that those two were not so dissimilar.
Yumi’s face lit up, and it seemed to Sachiko like the dénouement of a dreary day, or perhaps the climax of a happy one, her expression a ray of sunlight unabated by the clouds of the doubt that she would invariably experience later—as most did. Sei said, “Hurry it up already, would you? Or announce the wedding, or something. Rain’s coming back soon, and I’d like not to get my baby dirty so soon after I gave her a bath.”
“You sound a little like a very old woman who gets very excited over her cats, Onee-sama,” Shimako said quietly and politely. “If you’ll excuse my interruption.” She had a little grin on her face, one which Sachiko did not notice, but Sei did—Sei thought it to be very much a shit-eating grin, one which none of the rest here—save, perhaps, for Yumi, who Sei thought probably knew her petite soeur best—would have believed in for a moment, like some strange incarnation of a boogieman hiding just under a young, pretty girl’s young, pretty nose.
Shimako, however light and airy she may have seemed at times, was not without depth and edge; she was only very reserved and restrained, as Lillian had taught them all to be.
Or most of them anyway, Sei thought with a little shit-eating grin of her own. Most of them.
“Doubling up.” Sachiko intoned it very carefully, giving each syllable its own particular emphasis, so as not to botch up an unfamiliar word—not such a danger in Japanese as in Chinese, which Sachiko knew a little of, though speaking improperly still bore its own dangers and consequences. Sachiko didn’t speak so in order to avoid an embarrassing mistake, however. She said it as though she wanted to clarify it. You said double up, right? Yes, double up. Double up. Yes, double up. Dou…ble…up. Yes, that’s it exactly.
Then, what precisely is this?
It’s doubling up, silly. Sitting two to a seat. Most uncomfortable and dangerous, not to mention illegal. Doubling up. Fun, isn’t it? Like a game, only the goal is to stay out of jail and keep all your teeth. Doubling up. Some kind of fun.
Sachiko could, at first, only see this half of what she had agreed to when Yumi asked her to please spread her legs as she sat, so that she wouldn’t lose circulation as they drove. Sachiko had done so willingly enough, and then said it, said, “Doubling up.”
Yumi said, “Yes, doubling up,” as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and then she’d begun to crawl over her Onee-sama like a cat or a lover—the two were, according to the former at least, interchangeable—and Sachiko had caught on at last, and her mind jumped into its little tirade.
At last, she managed to say, “Yumi, forgive me for being rude, but isn’t this illegal?” That’s probably why I never considered it to be a viable possibility in the first place—everybody has that little side of them that wants to do wrong, but I don’t think this sort of wrong ever occurred to me. That must be it. I’m not that out of touch, that naïve.
Yes, she thought, that must be it. I’m not stupid. This is a bad idea, one beyond even my own capacity for bad ideas
self-doubt must be kept to oneself for a lady who fishes appears as a fisher long at sea
but…
“I know it is, Onee-sama,” Yumi said, her voice a little sheepish, as it usually was when she was called out on something, “but since we only have this one car, and…”
“Yes,” Sachiko’s voice dropped to a whisper, so the rest, still outside, couldn’t hear her, “but isn’t this something more suited for Rei and Yoshino? People who,” are comfortable like this arent they. She stopped. People who what?
People who are comfortable like this. Aren’t they.
Aren’t you?
Yumi stopped moving, chewed on her lip for a moment, considering the fabric of the seat. Then, tentatively, “Do you not want to…” do this? You sound like a
lover
…Like a what?
“I just…I didn’t expect it, that’s all,” Sachiko said, privately wondering why she was arguing. It would be nice to hold Yumi as this would necessitate—she been close to Yumi before like that, and the girl’s gentle warmth was always comforting.
And the feeling of her hands, holding mine to her stomach, asking me to shelter her. It had only happened once, but…
A word had occurred to her then, as it occurred to her now: Irony. After all, wasn’t this ironic? How lovingly she had embraced Yumi not an hour before, and how lovingly she had been embraced? And how she now fought against doing the exact same thing?
But it’s illegal. It’s unsafe. It sounded to her almost like whining, and the only people who whined were the fearful. Wasn’t that one of the important lessons she’d learned?
Learned from who?
From myself.
Then who spoke to me before, telling me to silence my doubt?
Wasn’t that also myself?
She supposed that maybe it was. Sachiko wondered briefly if this was some form of schizophrenia, and then dismissed it. Insanity was a staple of the rich sort, but not in a form that could be diagnosed by modern medicine. Not unless agonizing repression has found its way into med schools without my noticing.
So then, said that voice of me with which Sachiko was so ill-acquainted, I ask you, what is it that you’re whining about?
She couldn’t answer. She supposed that was a sign of progress.
“But,” she said, “I suppose that’s all right. Please have a seat, Yumi.” She spread her legs a bit and patted the space between them, silently thankful that she wasn’t wearing a skirt. Yumi smiled brightly, and crawled over her Onee-sama as gracefully as she could—a valiant effort to retain some semblance of propriety, but futile nonetheless: There was simply no way to be proper as you crawled on somebody, putting parts of yourself in places where they had no business being outside of a bedroom, trying desperately not to slip and botch the whole business—and, after a momentary struggle with gravity and a seemingly frictionless seat fabric which should not have existed outside of an introductory physics course, Sachiko found Yumi seated neatly between her legs, the tip of her head just barely touching Sachiko’s nose.
Sachiko smiled, allowed herself to lean forward slightly. As gently as she could, she inhaled deeply, taking in the girl’s scent and letting it wash over her, bringing her entire body to a sort of peace she hadn’t known in months. If Yumi—or Shimako, now beginning her own graceless clamber into the middle seat (it seemed that small cars such as this simply had it out for proper Ladies such as they)—noticed this, they said nothing of it.
As Shimako seated herself, Sachiko found that she had yet another dilemma to contend with—where to place her hands. Perhaps the others knew, having doubled up (it still sounded moderately foreign to her) before—perhaps they had some otherworldly sense of how to go about this whole messy business, in fact—but Sachiko was completely at a loss. She raised her hand, previously resting precisely where Shimako’s posterior was aimed, and let it hang in the air for a moment, as though to hail a taxi, or perhaps simply to ask her, where to, buddy?
Yumi’s hand darted up, taking Sachiko’s hanging limb with all the quick, mildly amused grace of a lover wiping a crumb from her partner’s lip—possibly with something other than a napkin or a handkerchief—and brought it down, down to
Warm
Her hand is warm
her stomach, held it there firmly for a moment, as though her shirt were an odd sort of glue, and she wanted to make sure it stayed just so.
Another word occurred to Sachiko at this point, completely out of the blue—odd, for her, but extremely well timed, as the other had been: Opportunism.
Is that what this is? And if so, on whose part? She supposed that was the real kicker, the question worth all the tea.
Or maybe it was precisely the opposite. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. A moment later she found her other hand—this one committing no offenses against anyone’s posterior—in a similar position, a gentle force pressing it into Yumi’s small belly. She could imagine Yumi’s face at this point—undoubtedly burning red—innocent, ready with some sort of excuse for the action, like they weren’t symmetrical. It would have driven you crazy, Onee-sama.
Sachiko, however, demanded no such excuse. She only smiled and took another breath, feeling herself utterly at peace for a moment.
It was a lovely feeling indeed.
This relaxed state lasted all of two minutes after the engine cleared its throat once, twice, and then started, humming and rumbling underneath her butt in a way that she wasn’t used to—all of her family’s cars had top-of-the-line mufflers. In the first minute, Yumi said, (speaking for the first time since putting Sachiko’s hands on her belly—probably she was savoring the feeling as much as her Onee-sama was) “Onee-sama, I think you should move your head.”
“Hmm?” Sachiko said, not as surprised as she should have been to find her voice a little bleary. “Why?”
“Because…well.…” At this, Yumi faltered a little, and Yoshino peered over the seat ahead of them.
“Because Sei drives like a madwoman, and I think Yumi wants to tell you that if you keep your head there, you’re likely to crack your teeth,” Yoshino said, a sly little grin on her face that Sachiko didn’t trust a bit.
“Oi, sit down over there,” Sei said, peering over as she set the car to backing out—a bit too quickly for Sachiko’s liking, but the parking lot was empty, wasn’t it? That was all. The others had talked, but Sei couldn’t be that bad of a driver, right?
Right?
Even so, she moved her head, craning it forward a bit so that she could rest it on Yumi’s shoulder. The sensation was not unpleasant.
What’s wrong with you? something small inside of her said, in a voice she didn’t recognize. You’re like a horny little schoolgirl, relishing every little chance you get to come in physical contact with your Petite Soeur. Where is your shame?
What’s wrong with it? she argued back, something she never would have done before. What’s wrong with touching somebody if touching them makes us both happy? I haven’t felt so relaxed in
What right have you to relax? The voice said, seeming almost angry. Who the hell said you could relax now? You’re to be wed in less than three months, and—
Three months? Something sunk out of Sachiko's chest.
That wasn’t right, was it? It was still years on the horizon, wasn’t it? Not until her first year of university was out, at least.
And yet, even so, it made a sick sort of sense to Sachiko. It couldn’t have been true, but it made sense.
Then the car jerked into motion—the two of them, Sachiko and Yumi, were veritably flattened against the back of the seat, and Shimako actually let out a small yelp—as Sei forced her way into traffic, earning Yoshino’s title of lead-foot, and Sachiko forgot about marriage as she hung on to Yumi’s belly for dear life. Yumi laughed a little wildly, Rei shouted at Sei to slow down (Sei acted as though Rei was naught but the wind) and eventually, Sachiko found herself laughing too. A little from fear, a little from excitement, but laughing all the same.
It was wonderful. Perverse, perhaps, but all the same. It was wonderful.
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