So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(14)

Because I wanted to prove to David that I was a go-with-the-flow kind of girl, breezily beautiful wearing just a swipe of mascara and a ponytail—I am not this person—I did not make my problem known. If I had, he probably could have helped me. Or taken me somewhere that sold pads. Instead, I reckoned I’d have to ration the tampons because we were getting more remote, not less.

Another thing I learned about riding motorcycles is that you have a lot of time alone, thinking your thoughts. Mine were mainly about my aching thighs, being cold (and getting colder), and whether I was going to bleed all over my gracious host’s Yamaha. One of my favorite things about driving is listening to music, so to distract myself from my multifaceted physiological predicament I decided to see how much of Bruce Springsteen’s discography I could sing by heart. I figured David couldn’t hear me, because I couldn’t hear me.

When we finally reached our home for the night, a hostel with tatami mats on the floor, I rejoiced to see there was a real bathroom. I figured that every time I found one, I could use the handy toilet-paper roll-around to conserve my supply. I would also stuff extra in the Kenneth Cole.

The next day we set off for the ferry to get us to Hokkaido, and that was when I felt a real shift in the weather. I’d thought I was cold before, but now I was really fucking cold. My jean jacket was cute but not cutting it. David, who was fully decked out in a winter coat, gloves, and a hat, offered me one of these items of clothing approximately every ten minutes.

“No, no, don’t worry!” I said cheerfully, my cheeks frozen in a fake smile/grimace. “I’m fine!”

I wasn’t fine by any stretch. I was happy to spend the night on the ferry.

*



It was lightly snowing as we disembarked the ferry the next morning. He saw the look of wincing panic on my face. “We’re just gonna go as fast as we can,” he assured me. “No stops.”

The effort of lugging around the Kenneth Cole didn’t produce enough warmth. Not even Born to Run could distract me from the way my fingers seemed to be detaching from my body. After about an hour I punched him in the back. “CAN I HAVE YOUR GLOVES?” I screamed.

Even so, when we finally arrived in the small town where David taught, I was freezing. His house was cold and damp because he’d been gone for a while, and didn’t have a ton of hot water. When I informed him of my plan to warm myself up in the bath, I was thwarted by how shallow it was: The water came up to mid-shin when I was sitting down. Very Little House on the Prairie, but without the cool outfits. Iron Chef hadn’t yet premiered in America, and it was the perfect level of Japanese to make just enough sense while I was falling asleep. (Remaining tampon count: two. Ruined underwear count: two.)

The next night, we got invited to a dinner with some of the older men in town. If this seems weird, let me explain: Everyone in this town was in awe of David. Picture a tall, curly-headed, blond, friendly American who spoke near-perfect Japanese descending on a small town of a few hundred people. Women of all ages would giggle when he walked by. On our way to the restaurant, David told me that they didn’t usually invite women to eat at the table at these dinners, but “they’re making a special exception for you.”

Now, I haven’t mentioned food yet in this essay. If you didn’t skip the IBS essay in this book out of disgust, you will find this odd. But I wasn’t eating enough for it to matter. The food thus far in the trip had been pretty bland and unremarkable—road food, gyoza, rice, that kind of thing. But this dinner is where the real Japanese food, the unheard-of stuff, came into play.

I was aware that the men had made a special exception for me, so I would have to eat whatever was put in front of me to be polite. The first courses were delicious. But then came the uni, or urchin, which I’d never had before and still believe is best described as snot. When it was set down in front of me, I knew I had to eat it, so I put it in my mouth. But as soon as I put it in my mouth, I knew that eating it would be impossible. Most people would think to raise their napkin daintily and discreetly to their mouths, deposit the offending foodstuff into it, and move on with the meal. I, however, felt everyone would surely suspect what I was doing if I put my napkin up to my mouth. So I waited until everyone was talking and spit the uni into my lap, only marginally more polite than Tom Hanks tasting caviar in Big.2 It slithered into the cuff of my pants, at which point I panicked and tried to brush it onto the floor. When I got home to New York I found I’d lost more than ten pounds.

The rest of the trip passed smoothly and uneventfully and was honestly a lot of fun, though it was a great example of how not being prepared can fucking suck. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that would have been so much better with some long underwear and a bounty of tampons.

David had to teach on my last day—he’d picked me up because it was a holiday, but when it was time to go back to Tokyo for my return flight, I had to do it on my own. The night before I had to leave he explained how to get there: Take a bus to a town where I would wait on a street corner for another bus. This bus would transport me to a small airport, where I would take a flight to the other, non-Narita airport (Haneda) in Tokyo, from which I would take a train to Narita for my flight. I was nervous, but I also felt like if I could make it on a motorcycle trip with four tampons and no gloves, I could do pretty much anything.

As he was leaving me to go to sleep, he looked back. “I love Born to Run, too,” he said. When I expressed shock that he could have possibly heard me at all, he replied that he could hear me the entire time.