Hello Kitty Stranger

Ginny rushed over to say hello. “Richard!” she called out, waving, but he swept through the door and out of the restaurant. He hadn’t heard her.

Oh well, next time, she thought, and returned to her table, taking a sip of her Coke. Funny, he’d been wearing dark pants and a brown jacket. Very unlike him. He was usually so dapper, flashy even. She wondered if he was okay.

The waiter arrived and swiftly set down her pizza, which glistened with cheese, ham, corn, and pineapple. She pulled a slice out, watching the cheese stretch until it snapped, and delivered it to her mouth, savoring the tangy-sweet pairing. Who cares if nobody likes this combination, she thought. It’s on the menu, after all. People who say they don’t like it must be lying.

She devoured several slices, pausing only for gulps of Coke as icy as the air that blasted from the AC unit above her head. As she ate, she watched the ceramic cat next to the cash register wave its neverending greeting. Beckoning, they said. Did it really bring customers in, or was it a good luck charm for money? Either way, it was cute.

Motioning to the waiter to wrap the final few pieces, she wiped her fingers on her napkin and placed it carefully on the plate. She gathered her bag, hooked her umbrella over her arm and went up to pay at the cash register, her head nodding along with the beckoning cat. She nodded more slowly to the cashier by way of thanks, and accepted her carefully wrapped takeout package, tucking it into her bag.

Exiting into a wall of heat and damp, the sky was dark and weighty. The downpour began just as she was crossing toward the station in the middle of the mass of people. Manuevering her umbrella upward, she pushed the button and a burst of pink opened above her, Hello Kitty waving on the side. She smiled. Her pink umbrella always made her smile despite the rain.

Emboldened by the pink, or by the waving Kitty, she stopped in the center of the intersection, letting the crowd flow to and fro on all sides. Alone, motionless, she scanned the sea of downgazing, determined faces, trenchcoats clenched tight at their chests. Hands raised umbrellas high, then pulled them low, attempting to avoid a collision.

Another Hello Kitty caught her eye among the sea of bobbing black and gray. It was Andrea!

“Hello hello!” Ginny called out, waving like the beckoning cat.

“Hello!” her sister said, and they bowed, their umbrellas knocking against each other. 

“Nice umbrella!” Ginny said, and they giggled over the sound of the rain pummeling the pink plastic.

“Arigatou gozaimasu. Bye-bye!” Andrea said, pronouncing the words ‘bai bai’. Pulling the umbrella closer, she brushed past Ginny and vanished into the crowd.

“Wait! Andrea!” Where was she off to? They hadn’t seen each other in ages. The crowd was thinning, so Ginny let herself be swept toward the station before the light changed.

It sure would have been nice to duck into an izakaya for a beer. To talk about things over skewers of yakitori, dripping with savory sweetness. To tell Andrea about her newest English conversation students, a pair of elderly women who dressed to the nines for the lesson each week. When they’d arrived for their first day of class, she’d nearly mistaken them for her aunts Clara and Fran, who also donned floral dresses with proper stockings and pumps when they went out to poetry readings at the library. She reckoned her students even went to the salon for a blow-dry before the big event. “Howayuu?” one would say. ‘I fine an yuu?” the other would respond and they would giggle like schoolgirls. By the following week, they’d forgotten the phrases and asked to begin again. Andrea would love that story.

Her Converse hi-tops were soaking wet, and water dripped onto the train platform from her umbrella, Hello Kitty now safely wrapped inside, snap fastened. It would be a long ride home, squeezed into a rush hour train with hundreds of other soaking wet people, cold air blasting down on her head. Oh well. 

Finally, at her stop, she bowed briefly to the kind strangers who moved out of her way, and exited the chilly damp train into a wall of heat. The rain had stopped, and any relief from the heat it had brought had evaporated. Ginny trudged home, hi-tops squelching, the pink umbrella just another thing to carry. 

In front of her squat grey apartment building stood Eve, her colleague at the ridiculously named Kaiwa-man English Conversation School, smoking.

“Hey.” Eve said in that nonchalant way smokers liked to talk. 

“Hey Eve! Guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“I ran into my sister just now, imagine that!”

“You are imagining that, Ginny.”

“No, really! We have the same umbrella. You know, pink with Hello Kitty on it?”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Eve said drily, glancing down at the one hanging from Ginny’s arm.

“Oh. Well, anyway, we only exchanged a few words since it seemed she was in a rush so I’m going to call her. See if she wants to get together.”

“You do realize it wasn’t her, right?” Eve said, flicking the ash from her cigarette onto the sidewalk. 

“What do you mean? I saw her, we talked, she was going the opposite way. Oh, and I saw Richard too! Is he okay, do you know? He was wearing drab clothes, I’ve never seen him in anything but…”

“Ginny.” Eve broke in, grabbing Ginny’s shoulder. She looked away, dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out, slowly. She brought her gaze back to Ginny.

“Ginny. Richard moved back to England last summer, remember?”

“England?”

“You’re here, in Tokyo, for God’s sake. Hello Kitty is from here, but you aren’t. Your sister is back home. Wherever home is for you, I forget.”

“What are you talking about? I am home, I just got home. This is home. It’s home for you too, we live here. In this building.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s home.”

“It is for me.”

“That’s nice, Ginny. But it hasn’t always been home for you either. And it’s never been home for your sister, has it?”

Ginny frowned, considering the question. Andrea had said “bye-bye” in Japanese, hadn’t she? Surely she'd just been joking around, speaking English with Japanese accents, like they all did sometimes?

“Ginny, get a grip.”

Ginny pushed Eve’s hand off her shoulder and held her pink umbrella aloft, waving it. Brandishing it. 

“Don’t tell me I don’t know my own sister. You don’t know shit. Nanimo wakattenai!”

“Look who’s talking,” Eve said, and shrugged.

Ginny turned on her heel, stomped to the door and made her way into her apartment, ditching her wet bag, wet umbrella and wet hi-tops, and yanking off her socks, in the entryway. She sank down onto the tatami mats in the single room, stretching out onto some random pieces of clothing and pillows scattered on the floor. She stared at the ceiling. Nothing made sense.

Sitting up quickly, she pulled out her phone and tapped.

“Andrea?”

“Ginny? What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? I, I… I just wanted to talk…” 

“What’s the matter,” Andrea said in the soothing tone she’d used when Ginny had scraped her knee falling off a bike, been rebuffed by a boy, failed a test. 

“Where are you? I just saw you at Shibuya… it was raining… we had our Hello Kitty — ” Tears began to stream down her face like the monsoon rains.

“Our Hello Kitty umbrellas?” Andrea chimed in. “You still have yours? Aww. Ginny, my lil mini-Ginny, it’s really sweet that you thought you saw me, already over there in Tokyo. I can’t wait to visit you, for you to show me around, show me what it’s like there, show me how well you speak Japanese. I’ll see you next week!”

“Next week?”

“Yes. Now I’ve got to get back to bed. It’s 3 a.m. here, you know.”

“3 a.m.?”

“See you soon.”

“Andrea?”

“Bye-bye!” 

“Can you bring your pink…” 

Ginny looked down at her screen. Call ended.

She crawled on hands and knees back to the entryway and pulled the takeout parcel out. Soaked, but salvageable. Surely Andrea had had pizza with ham, corn and pineapple before?

Ginny savored every bite.