Chapter 2: Motherhood

White, puffy clouds over the rolling New Jersey hills in the background. A white dot momentarily lost in those clouds re-establishes itself under their grey bellies, but not where he'd expected to see it. Fuchida stared hard. Dumb thing. Why had it hooked like that?

Yumi laughed, not a pleasant chuckle, but a triumphant, sneering chortle of victory. "You'll never catch me playing like that old man. And you used to think golf was a gentleman's game!"

Fuchida smiled ruefully. Must have been the ball. Last time he'd use the club's no name brand when he played his wife.

They walked back over to the cart and got in. Yumi began driving over toward his lie.

"Fuchida? We haven't heard from Steve in awhile. I wonder how he's getting along? "

"Oh for crying out loud Yumi, he's fine. The kid's established himself at that company of his, he's getting regular raises, he has a girlfriend, everything's cool. It's summer time; probably spending too much time at the beach and doesn't have time to think about his parents."

"Well, after all, I'm his mother. He should be able to spare me a thought and a call on occasion. I miss hearing from him."

"I suppose" he said. He was thinking about whether he should use a five, a three, or maybe a seven iron on this next lie? Eight holes into the game, and he had 4 strokes more than she had. He knew it shouldn't matter, and he tried hard to suppress it, but deep down he was humiliated. Maybe he should start sneaking away from the office more often....

Yumi fell silent, and the whining sound of the cart's electric motor replaced their conversation. She and Fuchida Mitsunami had a comfortable relationship. They were both New Jersey moderates, which made them liberals anywhere else in America, and they had been living together for 30 years. To please their parents, both sets of which were still living in Japan, they'd married when she had become pregnant with Steve. It had seemed such a bother, but it had had tax advantages at the time and it kept the in-laws quiet. Now, 26 years later, she was past desire for any one else but Fuchida and he had grown sensible enough to realize there wasn't much chance or much reason to look beyond his own household for affection. Their passions were focused on other things now, things like staying fit, saving the planet, keeping each other from drifting into narrow minded "old age" thinking, and their business portfolio. For Yumi, there was the lingering interest in Steve's life as well.

He was a business analyst with an investment firm on The Street, highly respected in his trade, and she was a professor of sociology at a small public college in New Jersey. Yumi harbored an increasing jealousy of her husband's far superior earning power, which Fuchida sensed and felt alternately smug and guilty about. Their lives had become more competitive since Steve had moved out on his own, which gave added impetus to their weekly golf matches. Yumi had, in fact, been playing three times a week at the college's small course without her husband knowing it, and that extra effort was paying off handsomely now. A woman could do anything she wanted to, after all, and if her life choices weren't as financially validated as his at least she could demonstrate her physical superiority.

"Here we are" she said. "Grab your iron and I'll meet you on the green. My ball is out in the middle of the fairway."

"Yes, dear" he said, absently, finally selecting the seven. Probably give him too high a trajectory, but even so it would put him close to the green. It was a good choice, and he'd only have to carry one club. "See you there."

Looking back at the tee and seeing no one, she decided to drive the cart out onto the fairway, take her shot onto the green, and then take it over behind the green to the cart parking area. Not strictly kosher, but it would get her there faster than Fuchida and she'd have time too look suitably bored waiting for him to catch up.

Yumi hadn't always been so competitive. Born in Japan after the second world war, her father had been an excellent but impoverished engineer for the Mitsubishi company. He had come to America looking for work and been part of the engineering team that developed airframes for early Boeing jetliners. At first Yumi and her mother had been left alone in Japan, and her earliest years were spent with her grandparents. In their traditional household, she had grown up learning proper behavior for young Japanese girls in a caring and nurturing environment. In a shattered world, she had grown up in a safe and well fed niche as her father and mother sacrificed valiantly for her well being. When she was twelve, everything changed. Her father summoned his wife and daughter to America. The onset of adolescence thus coincided with an introduction to American culture, and the young teenager begin to see a dichotomy between her household (which remained traditional, but was suddenly much more affluent) and the broader world. From this new culture she was delighted to learn, as all the children of the American baby boom learned, that the opportunity in life is limitless, that bowing to authority had lead her country as well as Germany to commit unspeakable acts of aggression, and that she could do anything she wanted to do with her life. She became excited about what the future might hold for her, about the freedom she had. As she finished her high school years and entered college at the University of Washington, the tightly constrained world she had been raised to accept as natural and virtuous was obviously not going to be her thing. At about the same time her parents had both become Christians, Methodists to be exact, and were in the process of trying to figure out how their new faith affected their traditional lives. They eventually returned to Japan during her college years. Yumi simply went her own way.

When she could, that is. For Yumi found many doors closed to her as a young woman in the early '60s. She resented the realization that there might be barriers to doing her own thing, and bitterly resented the assumption that as a young Asian woman she would be docile and unassertive. Slowly and in little ways at first, she'd gradually developed a quite assertive personality and became anything but docile. Her studies in sociology further fanned her interest in structural impediments to achieving her full potential, and by the time she graduated she was quite liberated, and spoiling for a good fight.

This wasn't the girl that Fuchida had met as a freshman at the UW. She was attractive, but almost painfully shy, and Fuchida had found her a fascinating cultural icon from a Japanese world he'd never known, having emigrated with his family from Japan before the Korean War had begun. Choosing to become an American citizen when his parents moved back to Japan in the 60's, he found himself highly attracted to this young woman who reminded him so of a culture he'd heard of only in stories. A child of his times, he welcomed and encouraged Yumi's growing "strength" and rebellion, first formally dating, then informally dating and fooling around, and finally taking up residence with her during the summer of love. The limitations on his future not being so severe, he was somewhat less rebellious and much more studious than his girlfriend. When they graduated in 1969, they moved together to New York's Greenwich Village, where they took up radical left wing causes and shared an apartment. He worked as a junior officer of a bank and she continued her education in sociology, eventually getting a Ph.D. After a few years they found that something had gone wrong with their fool proof contraceptive and Yumi was pregnant. Though abortion was just becoming legal, and was certainly acceptable in the circle of friends they cultivated, neither of them seriously considered it for their child. They were, in fact, rather delighted once they got over the shock.

Expressing this delight had an odd effect on their friends. Yumi found, much to her surprise, that feminist thought had moved somewhat faster than she had. To have a baby was, in the minds of her sophisticated friends, demeaning and tantamount to capitulation to patriarchal society, especially at her age. Couldn't she see that Fuchida was using her motherhood as a way to subdue her? Sincere and liberal as he seemed, he was still a man and men simply couldn't be trusted. Further, it was obvious that she didn't understand that every incremental American child was an ecological disaster of the first magnitude. Somewhat bewildered, she turned to Fuchida for comfort, and in doing so turned away from her society, her circle.

Fuchida, too, found that his delight at her pregnancy was met with blank, cautious replies from the men he knew and often outright hostility from the women. "Oh fine, you can be happy, your little brat won't be growing insufferably large in your belly, he won't rip your insides out in birth, and he won't snivel on your shoulder after he's out," was a typical comment. They discussed their alternatives, and decided that they simply couldn't destroy the child out of desire to remain "in" their circle. After marriage (another shocker for their friends) and Steve's birth, Fuchida took a more high performance job on Wall street and they moved, first to Brooklyn and then to the New Jersey suburbs. They gradually lost contact with most of the Village as it moved on, though a few of their friends eventually escaped, too, and they re-established good relations with them.

Yumi delighted in her son, but the estrangement from her friends and from all she'd come to cherish was depressing. She resented her parents' (and in-laws') pressure to marry, and though she and Fuchida succumbed and were indeed married when Steve arrived they never really forgave him for it. The pain of delivery was more intense than anything Yumi had ever known, and almost she wished she'd heeded her friends advice, during delivery. The beauty of her small boy took her breath away, though, and she was quietly proud of her creation after the fact. During those first few months of motherhood she lived for her child and her husband (which would have been just another shock for her former friends, had they known about it), enjoying every step, every noise, every wiggle of every finger. Her assertiveness lay dormant for a season.

Eventually, though, Yumi began to suspect that she was becoming her mother. Her husband, reacting to the sudden domesticity, had redoubled his efforts at work and was being rewarded with rapid promotion. He was, after all, pretty bright, which was why she'd been attracted to him in the first place. But the extra time away, just as she was having really warm feelings towards him, reminded her of her life as a little girl totally isolated from her father. His success rekindled, also, the determination not to be left behind by or become dependent on this man. So, steeling herself to her natural inclinations, she took her son at 6 months and put him in a day care facility, then began looking for a job in her field. She found one as an associate professor at a suburban college in New Jersey. Though she genuinely loved her son, and her husband, and she continued to enjoy her time with them, she often congratulated herself on not falling into the trap her mother had fallen into. Yumi was independent.

Though her career had never quite taken off as she'd planned it, and she was still teaching at the same small college, she'd had more than her share of academic success (that is, she'd been published several times) and had put the sociology department on the map in that school almost single handed. She had been interviewed in "Psychology Today" once, and her contributions to the understanding of social attributes of teenage groups with high suicide rates had briefly been mentioned in the national press. Fuchida had certainly never achieved such fame. It made her life worth something, to have achieved so much. It simply wasn't fair that society didn't pay her as well as her husband. Why should people care that he so often found ways to make an extra half a percent interest on investments anyway?

The fame, and the security it brought to her position at the college, made her self-confident. She relied on no one else, and was thus the epitome of a strong, independent woman. She'd stood up to them all, and beat them; her parents, her friends, and her husband. Even her son.

Funny how many things you could think about on your way to the goal. Here she was, as predicted, standing on the green waiting for Fuchida to make his final shot; he'd muffed the stroke out of the rough and had to take an extra one to get near the cup. Her shot from the fairway, on the other hand, had been perfect, right next to the flag. She'd taken a single stroke with her putter and nailed par for the hole, 3 strokes. There was no way Fuchida would be able to do that from where he was. She smiled to herself; another hole, another stroke ahead.

Fuchida, 35 yards from the flag, carefully lined up his shot. Seven iron was just about right, and the breeze had died down. Carefully swinging, he let the ball fly. It arched high, too high to Yumi's eye, and then suddenly dropped down, bounced on the green a couple times, and rolled.... right into the cup. A broad smile appeared on Fuchida's face as he strode forward to reclaim his ball.

Yumi, unflappable, said "Nice shot. Congratulations." Inwardly, she simmered. It wasn't fair.