Potentialities

In the interim between moving out of Boston and moving into Berkeley, Ryan and I are spending a week at his parents' rural Texas lakehouse, which to me is pretty much the best way ever to ease into a terrifying and potentially demoralizing transition from academia into The Real World. Ryan's parents have the infinite patience and bottomless pantry of a well-regulated military machine and/or a big family, with a refreshing lack of that obsessive, passive-aggressive neediness that passes for love in most Slavic families I know. Plus, they drink every night, go on impromptu motorcycle or camping trips around the country, and still manage to run two highly profitable small businesses, making them the model of adult success in my eyes.

Yesterday, we found out midday that a friend of ours was coming to visit. Ryan's mom dutifully bought sackfuls of burger fixins at Wal-Mart and made up the spare bedroom, just in case. Robbie, the friend, was one of the dudes who'd made up our Tokyo spring break group four years ago, and he'd loved it so much that he went back to teach English there for two years. Last we'd heard from this kid, he'd found himself a pretty, older Japanese lady, brought her back to the States, and gotten hitched. Given the delicate nature of such matters, Ryan thought it imprudent to ask whether he'd be bringing his wife on this visit. I was out on the deck reading when he arrived, and when I walked into the house, the first thing I saw was a tanned, smiling Japanese girl wearing a flowy floral sundress over an enormously pregnant belly. Robbie grinned goodnaturedly and didn't say anything, as if he were just as surprised by the whole thing as we were. "Hiromi," the girl introduced herself, giving me a barely material handshake and fixing me with her beautiful almond-shaped eyes. She didn't look a day over twenty.

As we all stood there awkwardly, trying to find something to say that wasn't immediately obvious, Hiromi spotted the lake beyond the sliding glass doors in the living room, and she headed straight for the deck. "Will we go swimming, Robbie?" she asked gently, her voice radiating the pure joy that also lit up her face. We changed into bathing suits, and I tried not to ogle the arresting spectacle of Hiromi in a black string bikini and a floppy denim sun hat. Before she got into the water, she did a quick round of calisthenics, stretching her thin limbs and torso and showcasing a strange juxtaposition of prominent ribcage and plump, perfectly gourd-like stomach. Ryan's brother offered her some foam pool noodles, which she eagerly accepted. "These are great! We don't have these in Japan. We have some things like this for kids..." she trailed off and bobbed happily in the warm Texas lake water.

Robbie made for the small square dock a couple dozen breast-strokes from shore. For a gangly, nerdy white boy, he was impressively skilled at small-scale water acrobatics. Last summer, I'd watched him do sets of front and back flips off that dock, so I was expecting another show this time around, especially since he now had a wife to impress. But after his first modest flip off the edge, which dappled Hiromi's sun hat with dark blue wet spots, she protested. "Roooobbie..." she cooed, never changing her honeyed tone or losing the glint of joy from her eyes, "I've already seen you do this." With the same bashful grin on his face, Robbie swam obediently back to Hiromi and, instead, began blowing into one end of the hollow foam noodles to make water jet out of the other end. Hiromi observed this activity with a mixture of maternal love and childlike amusement. "Like a whale!" she said, and, try as I might, I couldn't detect any hint of patronizing in her voice. I watched the two of them float together, exchanging quiet words in a mixture of English and Japanese, and I marveled at the strangeness of a world that could bring these two people together and put them in a lake in Texas. Then again, when I thought about it, it was no stranger than a world that could bring a girl from rural Ukraine and an all-American boy from Texas together and deposit them in that same lake. And who knows how strange and serendipitous things will get for Hiromi's unborn daughter, or for Ryan and my as-yet only hypothetically conceived kids. But it's nice to think about, and -- as seems to be the theme of this interim time in Texas -- a good way to put things into perspective.