The phone rang again half an hour later, Elly’s father calling from the mission home. He clicked on the speaker phone. The window in his office must have been open. Elly could hear, from eight thousand miles away, the Tokaido local arriving at Rokkomichi station. A sound so distant and yet so familiar.
Her mother said, “As I was telling your father, Elly, your grandfather was as much a conspirator in this elopement as anyone on my side of the family.”
Elly guessed from the proximity of her mother’s and father’s voices that her mother was sitting in his lap. She smiled, recalling the Wednesday before she left for BYU. She’d gone to the mission home to meet her parents for a bon voyage lunch and found Brother Izumi waiting in the outer office.
“Hi, Izumi Sensei,” she said. He’d been one of her father’s graduate assistants at BYU. Accounting, she recalled.
Brother Izumi nodded. He was either extremely shy or extremely polite. Or both. It was the ratio between the two she wasn’t quite sure of. Sister Amiya saw her come in and called her over with a question about a translation. Elly asked, “How long has he been here?”
“About an hour. He’s getting a letter of recommendation for his doctorate program. He didn’t have an appointment, so he won’t let me interrupt the president. He insists he’ll wait.”
She silently fumed. Sister Amiya, Elly could tell, had graduated from her mother’s school of interpersonal relationship management.
“Good grief,” Elly said. She took Brother Izumi by the arm and barged into the office. “You’ve got to be more assertive than this if you want to succeed in American academia.”
And there was her father, and her mother in his lap. It was like catching the CEO playing footsie with one of the office ladies. Not that Elly hadn’t seen it before (not CEOs playing footsie with the OLs—her mother making out with her father). And it wasn’t like they were making out or anything. They were probably discussing what nice girl’s college in the northern wastelands of Hokkaido they could send Emily to. But Brother Izumi nearly died from embarrassment on the spot. Even her father reddened a bit.
Her mother was cross with her, if only to assuage Brother Izumi’s dignity (“Didn’t we teach you to knock first?”), though with a twinkle in her eyes. As her father presented Brother Izumi with the letter and imparted a few minutes worth of paternal wisdom, it was all Elly could do to keep from dissolving into laughter.
Remembering that moment, Elly had to smile again. Her mother was right—she was happy, a happiness that only grew as she shared the reasons with more and more people. And wasn’t happiness the same as love?
Friday morning Connor phoned home. His parents had known about the marriage for a week or more. Elly was amazed they’d been willing to wait until she and Connor got around to making it official. This was a family with the patience of the hills.
Connor spoke briefly with his father about how he and Elly had met, to whom Elly was related, about the wedding, which of the relatives had attended. The précis of the dissertation. Then he handed her the phone. His father had a pleasant voice, aged in the sense that she imagined wine ages, full of pride for his son and admiration for her. He didn’t have a lot to say, though. Elly imagined squeezing a sponge as they approached the end of the third full sentence of conversation.
She gave the phone to Connor, and the conversation diverted into a discussion about a security setting in the latest version of Microsoft Windows—almost as if that were the real reason for the call—until Connor’s mother took over and yanked things back on subject.
“Thank goodness for you, Elly!” she said when the phone was handed to her. “I was beginning to fear Connor would never get married.”
“Twenty-five isn’t that old,” Elly argued on her husband’s behalf.
“It wasn’t age, it was expectations. A McKenzie man has it in him to fall in love once, I think. It’s a matter of coming to the right precipice and getting pushed off it. You sound like you were just the girl to do the job. You have told your parents by now, I hope.”
“We spoke with them last night. They’re going to hold a reception for us in Kobe over Christmas.”
“That’s right, Wanda mentioned that your father’s a mission president. I’m afraid Japan is a little far for us. Maybe we’ll come out for Thanksgiving.”
“That’d be nice.”
“Lynne says you wore the most extraordinary kimono.”
“My Aunt June’s. We’ll send you all the pictures. Oh, and thanks for the mattress set. It really was a most—unusual—wedding present.”
“I’ve always believed that a decent bed makes a good foundation for a sound marriage. That old mattress always threw my back out.”
“And we’re putting together Wanda’s brass bed.”
“You talked Connor out of those cinderblock contraptions of his?”
“But aren’t they such clever contraptions?”
“A man ought to be handy, if nothing else.”
When Elly got home that afternoon, she found Connor sitting on the bedroom floor with a socket wrench. He’d detached the cinderblock posts and propped up the frame with a section of two-by-four. Then he raised the frame and placed it on the bracket. He glanced over his shoulder. “How was lab?”
“Not bad. A lot like Eikaiwa. You wouldn’t think so many returned missionaries were signed up for 201. Even Susan showed up. “
“RMs start with 221. They’re not bugging you, are they?”
“Not really. RMs have decent comprehension but pretty bad grammar, and don’t know it. They’re my lab rats. It’s fun to experiment on them.” She tipped back the footboard. “Are you ready to attach this yet?”
“See how the frame fits on top of this lip on the post?” He stood and with a bit of jiggling slipped the fastening plates onto the joists. “Just put a little weight against the post so the plate doesn’t fall off the joists.” He leaned over and quickly tightened the bolts on each end. “There,” he said. “Looks pretty square.”
Elly agreed, and he attached the remaining four bolts. Then he held up the frame while she shoved the back two cinderblocks out of the way.
Attaching the headboard proved a bit trickier. They had to lift up the headboard and slide it down between the frame and the wall. Elly climbed up on the bed and held the top rail of the headboard while Connor lay beneath the frame like a mechanic working on the undercarriage of a car.
She knelt in the center of the bed and looked to her right and left at the headboard and footboard. “This is nice. Don’t you think?”
He flopped down on the comforter next to her. “I think it was doing it by myself the last time that left me ill-disposed. Things like this are a lot easier with two people.”
“Then I think I’ll leave you better disposed this time around,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him.
Getting into bed that night, she dispensed with subtlety and pulled off her top. Connor quickly lost interest in his Language Acquisition outline. A week and counting and she remained more than a little pleased at the effect her body had on him. He caressed her neck and throat with warm kisses until she cooed.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and wrestled him to the bed. “You’re stronger than that, even for a humanities major,” she kidded him. So he rolled her over and pinned her gently.
Something groaned. It wasn’t her. Gracious, she made more pleasant sounds than that in the throes of passion. The groan became a creak, and then a metallic grating. Followed by a sharp crack. The bed swayed like a raft riding in the wake of a powerboat.
It was like getting jolted out of bed by an earthquake tremor. Their lovemaking came to a screeching halt. Realization dawned on Connor’s face. He started to laugh.
“What?” Elly asked, a bit too frantically. She didn’t see the joke.
“I just remembered why I took the bed apart.” He assured her, “Don’t worry. It’s not going to fall apart. I mean, the bolts aren’t all going to pop out at once. Pretend you’re sleeping on a boat or an airplane.”
“The only boat I’ve been in was a canoe at girl’s camp and going waterskiing once or twice.”
“You’ll get to ride the ferry when we go to Maine. That’s the biggest boat I’ve been on.” He said, “I could get the cinderblocks.”
“No, that’s okay.”
Which wasn’t true. Every time she rolled over, the whole bed swayed. But she wasn’t about to make him get out of bed at this hour and start hauling blocks of concrete around.
She didn’t sleep well on airplanes either.