The Zipper by Rakuko Rubin

Christmas was over, but still the suburban neighborhood’s front yards and houses were festooned with hundreds of lights: bright red, yellow, blue, green. Sumiko backed the car out of the garage, glancing up at her own house, which looked deserted except for the faint light seeping from the living room window. For a split second, she felt like going back inside. But no: she had made up her mind. At some point, she would have to start moving forward, to escape the darkness, and today was the day. Tonight’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth by the Seattle Symphony was to be her first step in the right direction.

She pressed down on the accelerator.

The crowd at Benaroya Hall was as dense and varied as it had been two years earlier — couples in fancy dress, youngsters in more casual clothing, some in jeans. Sumiko walked among them until it was time for the performance to begin, the mixed aromas of coffee and wine and cosmetics bringing back pleasant memories. Then she took her program and found her seat.

The people around her were mostly middle-aged or older Caucasian couples, but among the white hair and bald heads she spotted a few Asian faces. Glancing over the program, she thought about the year-end Beethoven’s Ninth performance of two years before and the events that had transpired since then.

She and her husband always liked to close out the year by attending a performance of the Ninth Symphony, and she recalled the piercing cold of December 30 two years earlier. They had clasped hands as the voices of the chorus swelled in the “Ode to Joy,” sharing the warmth of their exhilaration, but he was no longer with her. She concentrated on the program, trying to dispel her loneliness.

Eighteen months had passed since Masato’s death. Sixty-six years old. A heart attack in the shower. By the time Sumiko realized what had happened and called the ambulance, he was gone.

They had moved to Bellevue, Washington, across the lake from Seattle, in 1989 when Masato took a position teaching Japanese at Bellevue Community College. It had seemed as if the economic bubble that took off in 1986 would never end as one Japanese corporation after another opened branches abroad. Most of the employees posted to Seattle chose to settle in Bellevue, a family-friendly community with good public schools and private facilities approved by the Japanese Government for teaching Japanese at the kindergarten and elementary-school levels. With no children of her own, Sumiko opened a small academy at home to help children with their Japanese and English skills. America’s 3-month-long summer vacations gave her free time unimaginable in Japan, and she and Masato found themselves going not only to art museums, the opera, the symphony, and live theater, but enjoying the many outdoor activities available in this region of mountains, lakes and the ocean: skiing, hiking, camping, fishing, boating, and biking. There were Japanese supermarkets as well, where she could find virtually all the ingredients she needed to make Japanese meals.

The more involved she and Masato became in the area’s lifestyle, the less either of them felt like going back to Japan after his initial 3-year contract was due to end, and he succeeded in finding a permanent teaching position at North Seattle Community College, though it meant a longer commute. Meanwhile, Sumiko’s growing reputation as an excellent teacher brought her an increasingly large number of pupils. And so twenty-eight years shot by. One peaceful day followed another in which they bought a house, became active in the Japanese-American community, and drew close to their neighbors.

Loud applause alerted her to the end of the first piece, Dvořák’s “Slavonic Dance.” She had hardly been listening, but she hastened to join the applause and forced herself to pay a bit more attention to Kodály’s “Dances of Galanta.” When it ended and the lights came up for intermission, she sat there watching the people shuffle toward the aisle. As she stood to join them, she reached up and touched the top of the zipper on the back of her black dress. Yes, the slider was up where it belonged, and the hook was properly set in the loop. In the warm hall, the movement of her arm wafted toward her the faint odor she had not noticed until now of clothing long shut in the closet.

Sumiko followed the crowd out through the exit to the lobby. Just then, she heard behind her two high voices raised in laughter. She looked around to see two Asian women embracing each other. They had obviously met here by chance.

Her attention was drawn to the taller one with long, slim arms and legs. Judging from the woman’s build and her dark complexion, she was probably of South Asian extraction, perhaps Thai or Vietnamese. Sumiko admired the stole she wore over her sleeveless long black dress, especially the subdued mix of red, yellow and green in a tortoise shell pattern against a black background. Her compact body gave off a youthful air overall, but the slight sag of the flesh near her elbows and neck suggested a woman in her late fifties or early sixties. With any luck, Sumiko thought, she might be able to ask this woman’s help.

The bell signaled the end of the intermission. People began drifting back into the auditorium in a slow-moving wave.

The mixed chorus of over 100 singers was already in place behind the orchestra, and the audience greeted the four soloists with warm applause. Like the chorus, the tenor and baritone were dressed in black and white, but the soprano and mezzo-soprano added a contrasting touch of color in their long, low-cut gowns, the soprano in red and the mezzo in purple. When the fourth movement’s “Ode to Joy” finally started, their voices filled the hall. Sumiko followed the English translation of the German text in the program. The song opened with praise for the divine power of joy, but the next passage particularly struck her:

Whoever has succeeded in becoming
A friend to a single friend,
Whoever has won for himself a dear wife,
Let him join in our jubilation!

Yes, let him exult even if in all the world
He has but one soul with whom
To share his feelings!
And anyone who cannot accomplish this
Should steal away from our circle in tears!

I used to have one soul with whom I could share my feelings, but he is gone now. Will I just be waiting in tears until the day I die? Will the joy of life not come to me anymore? Sumiko thought of the stark, cold emptiness of the house to which she would be returning alone, a house in which she was the only one who drew breath, a house without the living sound of speech or laughter, where all the furnishings and accessories seemed to match her sorrow with closed hearts. Do I want to go on living in a house from which the soul vanished the moment my husband left it?

The concert ended with loud cheers and applause. Even as she joined in the standing ovation, Sumiko began to worry about her zipper. She would have to spend all night in this dress if she couldn’t manage to get help with it. She looked at her watch. It was already after ten. She would have to ask Carole to help her tomorrow morning.

She joined the stream of people exiting the hall and walked toward the elevators to the underground parking lot. Both had crowds in front of them. The doors on the right opened and Sumiko found herself almost being pushed inside. Just as the doors were about to close, however, a woman came rushing in. Sumiko caught her breath: it was the very woman she had noticed during the intermission. She felt her heart pounding.

The elevator stopped at the first parking level, and the woman stepped out along with seven or eight other passengers. Sumiko had parked one level down, but she decided on the spur of the moment to get out here. The woman moved straight ahead with long, rapid strides, and Sumiko hurried after her.

“Excuse me, I wonder if I could ask you a favor,” she said.

“Pardon me?”

The woman whirled around and stared at Sumiko, her warm eyes like two dark chunks of obsidian.

“I’m sorry, I have a favor to ask. It’s a little strange, but don’t worry.”

“I hope I can help you.” The woman’s tone was gentle.

“Do you think I could ask you to lower the zipper part way on the back of my dress?”

The woman said nothing.

“Sorry, I should probably explain. I live alone, but I had a special reason to wear this dress. In memory of my husband. My next-door neighbor zipped it up for me, but now I have to lower it. I can just reach the zipper, but I can’t pull it down. I think my neighbor will be asleep already.”

“My goodness, no one’s ever asked me to do a thing like that. Sure, I’ll be glad to.”

“Oh, thank you, it’ll be such a help.”

Sumiko turned her back to the woman and lowered the shoulders of her coat. The woman approached her and used both hands to unfasten the hook. With her left hand at the top of the dress, she used her right hand to lower the zipper.

“Is this low enough? You’d better check.”

Sumiko brought her hand around back and made sure she could reach the partially lowered zipper. Then she raised the shoulders of her coat again.

“Thank you so much! You’re a life-saver.”

The woman gave her a broad smile and tittered. “It was nothing. Well, then . . .”

She walked to a car two or three vehicles ahead and unlocked the door. Sumiko stood there watching her slip into the driver’s seat. I could be friends with someone like her. At least I should have asked her email address. But by the time the thought crossed her mind, the car was gone.

— translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

About the Author

Rakuko Rubin was not killed in 1945 when an American bomb smashed her house to smithereens in Kyushu, Japan, which is why she has been able to write this and other short stories when not working on her pottery wheel. She lives near Seattle with her contrite American husband, a translator of Japanese literature.