Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden Page B

toilet a few times to clear it out.
    Those tiles in the noonday sun felt like hot skillets to me; while I emptied the bucket, I couldn’t help but think of the cold water of the pond where we used to swim back in our village on the seashore. I’d been in that pond only a few weeks earlier; but it all seemed so far away from me now, there on the roof of the okiya. Auntie called up to me to pick the weeds from between the tiles before I came back down. I looked out at the hazy heat lying on the city and the hills surrounding us like prison walls. Somewhere under one of those rooftops, my sister was probably doing her chores just as I was. I thought of her when I bumped the tank by accident, and water splashed out and flowed toward the street.
    *  *  *
    About a month after I’d arrived in the okiya, Mother told me the time had come to begin my schooling. I was to accompany Pumpkin the following morning to be introduced to the teachers. Afterward, Hatsumomo would take me to someplace called the “registry office,” which I’d never heard of, and then late in the afternoon I would observe her putting on her makeup and dressing in kimono. It was a tradition in the okiya for a young girl, on the day she begins her training, to observe the most senior geisha in this way.
    When Pumpkin heard she would be taking me to the school the following morning, she grew very nervous.
    “You’ll have to be ready to leave the moment you wake up,” she told me. “If we’re late, we may as well drown ourselves in the sewer . . .”
    I’d seen Pumpkin scramble out of the okiya every morning so early her eyes were still crusty; and she often seemed on the point of tears when she left. In fact, when she clopped past the kitchen window in her wooden shoes, I sometimes thought I could hear her crying. She hadn’t taken to her lessons well—not well at all, as a matter of fact. She’d arrived in the okiya nearly six months before me, but she’d only begun attending the school a week or so after my arrival. Most days when she came back around noon, she hid straightaway in the maids’ quarters so no one would see her upset.
    The following morning I awoke even earlier than usual and dressed for the first time in the blue and white robe students wore. It was nothing more than unlined cotton decorated with a childlike design of squares; I’m sure I looked no more elegant than a guest at an inn looks wearing a robe on the way to the bath. But I’d never before worn anything nearly so glamorous on my body.
    Pumpkin was waiting for me in the entryway with a worried look. I was just about to slip my feet into my shoes when Granny called me to her room.
    “No!” Pumpkin said under her breath; and really, her face sagged like wax that had melted. “I’ll be late again. Let’s just go and pretend we didn’t hear her!”
    I’d like to have done what Pumpkin suggested; but already Granny was in her doorway, glowering at me across the formal entrance hall. As it turned out, she didn’t keep me more than ten or fifteen minutes; but by then tears were welling in Pumpkin’s eyes. When we finally set out, Pumpkin began at once to walk so fast I could hardly keep up with her.
    “That old woman is so cruel!” she said. “Make sure you put your hands in a dish of salt after she makes you rub her neck.”
    “Why should I do that?”
    “My mother used to say to me, ‘Evil spreads in the world through touch.’ And I know it’s true too, because my mother brushed up against a demon that passed her on the road one morning, and that’s why she died. If you don’t purify your hands, you’ll turn into a shriveled-up old pickle, just like Granny.”
    Considering that Pumpkin and I were the same age and in the same peculiar position in life, I’m sure we would have talked together often, if we could have. But our chores kept us so busy we hardly had time even for meals—which Pumpkin ate before me because she was senior in the okiya. I knew