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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2008

Shirley Temple DreamsShirley S. Louis

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

SHIRLEY TEMPLE DREAMS

By

SHIRLEY S. LOUIS

(aka NIKKI NOJIMA LOUIS)

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008

Copyright © 2008 Shirley S. Louis

(aka Nikki Nojima Louis) All Rights Reserved

ii

The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation defended on April 9, 2008. _______________________________ Mark Winegardner Directing Dissertation _______________________________ Neil Jumonville Outside Committee Member _______________________________

Robert Olen Butler Committee Member

_______________________________ Julianna Baggott Committee Member

________________________________ Christopher Shinn Committee Member

Approved:

____________________________________ Stan Gontarski, Director, Graduate Students Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has ve rified and approved the above na med committee members.

iii

To all my teachers, from whom I learned more than writing,

and to the memory of

Denise Levertov, Grace Paley, and Carol Bly

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgements to members of my Committee—Mark Winegardner,

Julianna Baggott, Robert Olen Butler, Christopher Shinn, and Neil Jumonville—and to

the other FSU teachers of writing—Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Bob

Shacochis, and Virgil Suarez—who have encouraged me in my endeavors and set

standards for me of excellence in art, scholarship and humanity.

I am indebted to Florida State University for the Kingsbury Fellowship and the

Dissertation Research Grant that sped me to the completion of this project. I am grateful

to the arts residencies, writers’ conferences, and individuals who offered me fellowships,

scholarships, and sanctuary: Ragdale Foundation, Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation,

Island Institute, Mary Anderson Arts Center, Fine Arts Work Center Writers Conference,

Wesleyan Summer Writers’ Conference, Vermont College Postgraduate Summer

Writers’ Conference, David Guterson Fiction Award, Seattle Arts Commission, Anne

Powell of Tallahassee, Jane Stuppin of San Francisco and Sebastopol, and Martha Brice

of Seattle.

Three of the stories in Shirley Temple Dreams are published under the name Nikki

Nojima Louis: “Glory” in Rosebud (winner, Ursula K. LeGuin Fiction Contest), “Good-

bye, Gorilla” in The Indiana Review (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), and “Hidden

Idaho” in the forthcoming issue of Inkwell.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract vi

1. GLORY 1

2. IN A GARDEN IN HIROSHIMA 7

3. DAYS OF SPACIOUS DREAMS 12

4. PEACH GIRL 31

5. SHIRLEY TEMPLE DREAMS

I. The Next Best Thing 48

II. Harmony 69

III. In the Magic Valley 80

IV. One Fine Day 90

6. GRACE IN THE MORNING 92

7. STICKS AND STONE 107

8. GOOD-BYE, GORILLA 110

9. AWAKE IN THE DARK 134

10. SMOKE 150

11. HIDDEN IDAHO 166

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 177

vi

ABSTRACT

Shirley Temple Dreams is a collection of linked stories about Japanese Americans

before, during, and after World War II, the times ranging from the turn of the century to

the postwar fifties. Eleven stories are structured into three parts: stories that are situated

in Japan; stories in American internment camps; and stories of postwar diaspora and

return.

The collection opens with a story about a writer who realizes the centrality of

stories in her life, and it closes with a story about a man who learns to share his stories.

These stories are about passages—of time and place; of one generation that strides into

the future and another that searches the past; of the move from foreign soil to the fields

and forests of the western United States; of settlement, displacement, and resettlement.

The stories are set against the backdrop of social trauma, but they are foremost about

people—characters in trouble, man-made and self-made—and how they cope, survive, or

fail.

I have brought to these stories my interest in Japanese culture, literature, and folk

lore as well as American popular culture. The tension between the two sides of the

hyphenated identity, Japanese-American, is a major presence. Inclusion vs. exclusion,

the group vs. the individual, duty vs. freedom are classical themes now seen through the

lens of an “other.”

1

GLORY

Tatami mats whirl over the woman writer’s head, whipping through clouds of dust, then

resettle on the floor. Her chair and writing desk hang, bat-like, from the ceiling. Books

fly across the room, their pages flapping like wings of gulls. When the whirling stops,

the woman writer stands in the middle of the three-mat room she has rented and surveys

each corner.

The room sits over a barbershop in Tokyo’s declining pleasure district. The

woman writer has not left it for three days. It is a room in which she waits for a lover

who does not appear, a room in which she works on a new story for which she has missed

one, then two deadlines, a room in which she has picked at solitary meals brought to her

by the owner of the noodle shop next door, the trays placed discreetly outside the door.

She has rented this shabby room over the barbershop to escape the young women who

cluster outside her house, wait for her in the rain, stop her on the streets. The room is

located near the fourth-rate Kabuki theatre in which her lover is an apprentice performer.

The woman writer knows that her lover is greedy and ambitious and has found a new

patron. She knows that he is one of hundreds of young men who flock to Tokyo from the

provinces with only their sulky good looks and firm bodies, and that he is uncomplicated

and mercenary. Yet, she waits for him and she writes.

She has left the sliding door open and sits on the floor. She listens to the lash of

the barber’s razor against his leather strap, the murmur of voices and the sound of

footsteps. She knows the firm walk belongs to a customer and that he is wearing

Western-style shoes. Only a man who can afford to be waited on moves with such

assurance. Perhaps he is European, even an American.

Foreign ships have been docking at Tokyo Bay for months. Sailors and officers

cram into rickshaws and carriages to throng to this ancient district famous for its geishas

and printmakers, its teahouses and puppet theaters. The days of the floating world of

2

pleasure are nearly gone; two decades later, the district will emerge as the neon world of

postwar Tokyo. But it is 1927 now, and the woman writer waits.

She listens to the muffled sounds of the barber’s straw sandals and knows that he

scurries after an ever-dwindling clientele.

“Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.”

Only the old-fashioned cash register he has inherited from his father rings with

confidence.

“Your change, sir. An honor to serve you.”

The customer opens the door, the tiny brass bell hanging over it rings, the barber’s

high-pitched voice trails after him.

“Come again, won’t you? Any time, sir. Always at your service.”

The woman writer knows the barber stands in the doorway. He’ll watch the

customer cross the street, then call after him.

“Be seeing you soon, I’m sure!”

The door closes; the bell sounds its back-and-forth note. The barber swoops the

shade down over the door. He hums as he sweeps the floor, hums as he cleans his

instruments. Then, the ping! of the cash register, and she knows he will take the money

out of the drawer. He’ll go now, she thinks.

She knows the barber will walk a few steps to the noodle shop. The elderly

proprietress will greet him as he climbs onto a stool at the counter. She will bring him a

bowl of steaming noodles, which he will deftly slurp into his mouth with black lacquered

chopsticks. When he finishes, a sigh of pleasure will escape from his lips, then a

sustained belch. The proprietress will shout her thanks as he places his money on the

counter. She will shuffle around the counter and make short, profuse bows as the barber

goes out the door.

“Thanks! See you next time!”

When the barber is on the street, he will stroll to the Toyo Silent Cinema and flirt

with the ticket girl.

3

It is October and the light quickly fades. A cold wind sweeps through the streets and

enters the room through invisible cracks. The woman writer scoops charcoal into the

brazier, lighting it with a sheaf of papers, discards of her day’s work. She huddles on the

floor, wrapping her kimono sleeves around her. She has worn the same crescent-

patterned garment for three sleepless days and nights. Its flowing sleeves and wide sash

are more flattering to her thickening body than the tight bodices of Western clothing. She

has had an entire winter wardrobe of silk and brocade kimonos made for her lover’s

pleasure, for the games in which they replicate stories of passion and yearning seen

nightly at the Kabuki theatre nearby. The kimonos wait in a cedar chest in the corner,

waiting.

Strands of hair have loosened and fall across her face. Impatiently, she gathers

them, jabs a tortoise-shell comb into her scalp. Howls in pain. The wind lifts and slaps

the shutters against the house. A branch tears off a tree, falls across the terrace. The

barber has forgotten to tie back the awning. It tears free and flaps aimlessly, like a

wounded bird. The woman writer walks to her desk, sits in her high-backed chair, toes

curled over its rung.

She dips her pen into the inkwell and scrapes off the ink against its sides. She

uses the same concentrated movements with which she practices chado, the art of Tea.

Her fingers are as smooth as a girl’s, except for the second finger of the right hand, on

which there is a large carbuncle. How many times have I done this, she thinks, looking at

the blank sheet. Black tracks on virgin snow.

The pen hangs over the paper like a dagger waiting to be plunged. Is there

anything left to say, she wonders. Was there ever, or was as it all sham? Ego? Vanity?

What is left now except time? Leftover life to kill. The frozen sea. She closes her eyes.

The river rushes— her mother slaps the wash against the rocks—all the women at the

water’s edge—gossiping, laughing. Their children play by the shore. “Po-po-po, hato

po-po” They sing of blue skies and pigeons. The water is icy, transparent. It ripples

through her.

What of talent? What of joy? She lowers the pen and writes. The floating

world— a country girl—sold to the geisha quarter—servants, maids, dancers,

4

entertainers, wealthy clients—alcohol, opium, madness, suicide. When her first story

won the national competition, the famous author stroked her knee. The prize money was

more than her father had made in his lifetime. Her stories serialized in Asahi, translated

into foreign languages. The famous author gave her a fur—two young foxes, the jaw of

one locked onto the tail of the other, dead eyes like amber beads, brittle whiskers erect.

Her fiancé was killed at Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War. He was a sweet boy

from the village—she can no longer remember his face. The famous author was married,

full of promises. She eloped with the famous journalist—to Manchuria and Singapore, to

Paris and Bonn—he’s now a famous drunkard. Her second husband is older. He sells

munitions to foreigners.

The pen is an extension of her hand. She writes swiftly, dips the pen over and

over into the well. The pen is a thirsty lover. Friendship, passion, marriage, betrayal.

Unborn, stillborn, children. The Kabuki actor is young enough to be her son. Thin men

with slicked hair wait for him outside the stage door. Tears, scenes, lies, evasions. He is

indifferent and cruel. He is magnificent.

She loosens her grip on the pen, slows her pace, finishes the line. She begins to

read. Rips some pages—torn wings drifting to earth—crumbles others. A carpet of dead

paper. She hunches over the inkwell. It is made of serpentine, its lid an ornately carved

silver swan—a gift from her German publisher—it was said to have belonged to the

Empress Maria-Theresa.

“What’s your secret, ink?” she croaks. She flings the inkwell against the wall.

The ink drips calligraphically down the yellow-stained wall. But the well lands

on its side and the lid has snapped shut. The woman writer picks up the well and returns

to her desk. She begins again.

The young woman was with child. She threw herself into her family’s well. A

windflower floats on the water’s black surface. When the man from the city asks, How

old was she?” he is told, “Fifteen.”

She fills the page with hasty, sinewy strokes. She fills another page, another.

Breathless, she pants, leaning against the desk. Her breathing becomes silent, rhythmic.

Soon there is only the sound of pen and receiving paper.

5

The wind has stopped. Her lover’s face shines down on her, his thick lashes and

dark brows.

“He’s hairy like an Ainu,” one of her colleagues had whispered into her ear.

“Surely not Japanese.” Her rival’s eyes glinted under an ostrich-feathered hat. They had

sat side by side at the Women Authors banquet, waiting to hear which would receive First

Place. She was jealous I took the prize thinks the woman writer, stroking the knot on her

finger. Why should I care what the bitch says?

She remembers the pupils of her lover’s eyes, their almost purple glint, and she

wants to vanish in them. His skin is spectrally pale, his cheeks hollowed with secret

caverns. His nostrils flare—she fears his impatience, his boredom. But his lips are as

soft as a child’s; they contain a repertoire of pouts and half-smiles. His purple-black eyes

never laugh.

She had once traced her fingers across his Adam’s apple. It seemed enormous in

his pale, young throat. “It’s your one vulnerability,” she said.

They had made love in her husband’s study, surrounded by English leather and

volumes lettered in gold. They’d mounted the sofa as if it were a great leather beast, their

bodies squeaking and slithering, sticking to the great beast’s hide. Later, they lay gasping

on her husband’s Persian rug, like two carp out of water.

“Yes, it’s your one flaw. I might cut it out.” She kissed it, then fit her teeth

around its contours. “What would you do with it?” he had asked. She felt it move

against her mouth. “I would eat it like a young persimmon,” she replied. “I would crush

it between my white teeth.”

A fly buzzes. The woman writer opens her eyes. She had fallen asleep, for how

long she cannot tell. She turns toward the direction of the sound. The fly has landed on a

strip of sticky paper that hangs from the window frame. In the opaque light, she watches

it struggle. The body sways while the legs strain to pull free, the antennae wave in

strange choreography, the wings whirl, crying for flight. The woman writer wonders if

the fly is screaming and she cannot hear it.

She strokes her face with a lover’s caress. Arching her neck, she lifts her head, a

flower reaching toward the sun. The image of her lover returns. His young face looks

6

down, tenderly now, without malice or irony, the smile spreading across his face and into

his eyes. She sees her reflection in them and she too smiles. Soon, her lover’s face

grows smaller, then smaller still. Finally, it is so miniaturized that she can no longer

make out its details. Like a jewel, it fits into the palm of her hand. Slowly, she closes her

fingers over her lover’s face, over his tender child’s eyes and the slightly parted lips

verging on a smile. His face buzzes in the center of her palm.

The woman writer rises from her desk and sits on the tatami-matted floor. One

hand rests in her lap, the other cradles her lover’s tiny image. Raising her fist toward her

face, she looks at the carbuncle on her finger, her writer’s mark. It is permanently stained

with ink. She had been admonished for holding her calligraphy brush too tightly; the

teachers did not want to accept a student from the village. I’ve always held things tightly,

she thinks. I’ve never been able to help it. She strokes the knot on her finger.

The wind has taken up again and knocks over a planter on the terrace. The sky

shines with a metallic glow. The shattering of the planter startles the woman writer, but

she feels pristine. She walks to the window and opens it, carrying her lover’s face in her

closed hand. She pulls the wooden pins out of her hair. The tortoise-shell comb shakes

loose and catches in her silver-flecked, waist-length hair.

She feels her lover’s warmth. She opens her hand and lifts it to the sky, as if she

were releasing a dove to a waiting hawk. Her lover’s face whirls away, carried by the

wind.

The papers on the corner of the woman writer’s desk billow and float to the floor.

White butterflies fill the groves of the village. The farmers walk home from the fields.

She shuts the window and turns toward the room. Bending, kneeling, she picks up the

pages of her manuscript. One by one, she arranges them in their proper order. Carefully,

she places them in the center of her desk.

7

IN A GARDEN IN HIROSHIMA,

I am a little girl dressed all in white. A crinoline frock trimmed in silk and shantung and

mother-of-pearl buttons, slender sleeves that poof at the shoulders, a collar of lace as fine

as a spider’s web. Under this ankle-length dress I know I am wearing an eyelet chemise,

a stiff and scratchy petticoat, and cotton pantalets. My stockings are silk, my high-button

shoes are as soft as gloves. A large bow sits on my head like a silent white butterfly. Am

I Alice in Wonderland, I wonder?

I am alone in my bed. I am in my grandfather’s garden. I am in a dream of

wonderland, a tourist in a picture gallery of myself. I am past and present and

unknowable future. I am myself and yet another. What was I reading when I fell

asleep? Was it something I ate? Was it the swordfish?

The garden is on my father's family estate. My father isn’t with us because he's in

America, a young man attending university. Neither is my mother here, for she has not

yet met my father. They will be introduced at a miai—matchmaking ceremony—in the

San Leandro Valley. I don't belong here either, for I have never been to Japan, and I will

not be born for twenty-two more years. Yet, I've wandered into this garden of my

family's past, and my father's parents are here, among the boulders and goldfish ponds,

the teahouse and bamboo grove, the streams and moon-viewing bridges of my ancestral

past.

It is autumn, 1910, and the Japanese maples have dropped their leaves on the banks of the

Kanon River.

Grandfather Yogi wears a Shetland wool cape and carries an ivory-handled

walking stick. A black homburg sits on his bald, dome-shaped head. At home and

8

abroad, he is called the Japanese Teddy Roosevelt. In 1905, he sat eye-to-eye with the

Western Allies—the American President, the German Kaiser, the British Prime

Minister—to negotiate the terms of peace of the Russo-Japanese War.

He is at this moment sixty-nine years old, the portrait of an Edwardian

gentleman—with mutton-chop whiskers and a mustache that curls at the ends—until my

gaze moves to the finely woven kimono that extends beyond the hem of his dark cape,

the glaring white tabi—stiff Japanese socks split at the toe—and his geta, high wooden

platform sandals.

Grandmother Yogi sits on a bench of shining paulownia wood, around whose

base are carved the stories of her samurai ancestors. One, a tutor to the child emperor,

bends over a book. Another, on horseback, draws his bow. In a cluster of figures,

warriors defend a curtained palanquin, from which emerges a feminine hand. In another,

women with spears and swords fight on the parapets of their burning castle, infants tied to

their backs.

My grandmother wears a silvery-gray, diamond-patterned kimono. A lighter-

hued under-kimono lines the contours of her slender neck. My father has told me that she

played the shamisen, a lute-like instrument, expertly; that when my grandfather returned

from his diplomatic missions, they would retire to the teahouse in the garden, where he

listened to her play into the night. Sometimes grandfather accompanied her on his

shakuhachi, a bamboo flute capable of a sad and penetrating sound.

They pose now, still as stone. Grandfather's hand rests on Grandmother's

shoulder. They are connected statuary, a tableau of contrasting alliances.

Only the fringe on Grandmother's Spanish shawl moves, only the maple leaves

rustle along the ground. Then, I realize that the grass, the bamboo, the gently flowing

waters of the stream have no hue, that I cannot tell the color of my grandmother’s boldly

patterned shawl or of the fringe that sways lightly from its edges. I see that the maple

leaves are only shades of dark and light.

I know now that I am standing in a photograph. It is the oldest photograph in our

family album, one I've known all my life, the only reminder of my father's life in Japan,

the only time I've seen an image of my grandparents. The photograph is slightly faded, a

9

bit blurred, streaked with light and dark, shadow and shade. The red ink of our family

stamp glows from the lower corner of the border.

“Aki-chan, Aki-chan.” Voices come from the edge of the garden. They call out

the diminutive of my name, Akiko, autumn child.

Six gardeners stand on boulders that edge the garden, dark-skinned men in loose

happi coats and pantaloons ending at the calf. They are bare-chested under their work

jackets, and their pantaloons are tied at the waist with rope. Headbands stitched with our

family crest hold back their shoulder-length hair. They have come alive and call to me.

“Come down at once and play,” I demand.

"Sorry, little Miss,” one of them shouts down, “we must keep our place." He

speaks in English, for that is the only language I know.

Grandmother sits with serene stillness, slender hands folded in her lap.

Gradually, like an ice sculpture that has been brought into a warm room, she yields.

When I approach, she tilts her head slightly and she smiles. Her eyes are tender. My

father once told me that he had never heard his mother raise her voice.

I skip to my grandfather, who looks down at me with glowering eyes. He hovers

over me like a giant bat, all dark cape and homburg and wooden geta on their high

platforms. What will happen when this fierce face comes alive, I wonder. I want to run

back to my grandmother’s arms. But suddenly, the rocky visage moves. Lips part, a

smile spreads and stretches across a cavern of gold-filled teeth from which a tremendous

guffaw explodes.

Grandfather leans forward. A large hand emerges from his cape. The hand

presses on my head, my hair bow flattens, then lifts, then is pressed and lifts again. Two

short, hearty pats, and the bow returns to its butterfly shape.

A shiny chain dangles from his vest. I know this chain, just as I know that at the

end of the chain is my grandfather's gold watch, the watch that was left to my father and

handed down to me, the last of the Yogi clan.

My grandfather exaggerates a frown and reaches in a pocket, drawing out a closed

fist, from which he uncurls his fingers, one by one. In the hollow of his palm sits a tiny,

monochromatic persimmon.

10

Grandfather shouts.

"Ichi!” One.

He draws another persimmon from his pocket.

"Ni!" Two.

A third shout, "San!" until three persimmons sit in his life-lined palm.

Walking to grandmother as a stage magician strides toward a bespangled

assistant, he hands her his ivory-topped cane. She stands on tiptoe and removes his cloak

from his shoulders. The nightingale and the bat. She nearly disappears behind his dark

silhouette.

Grandfather begins to juggle the persimmons. Faster and faster he tosses them

until they are whirling balls. Their velocity makes whipping sounds in the air.

Grandmother sits again and watches, the cape draped over her lap, over the carved

pedestal of her ancestors.

Grandfather throws back his head. He laughs at the sky. The persimmons dip in

and out of his hands, returning each time to fly higher. The sky is no longer

monochromatically gray but bright cerulean; the Japanese maples are crimson, the fringe

on my grandmother’s Spanish shawl shines a brilliant emerald green, the persimmons

turn into golden balls of fire.

I clap and laugh with glee. The gardeners join in with singsong chants.

Grandmother's laughter is soft and girlish. Her small fingers curl around the ivory

carving of grandfather’s cane.

"Aki-ko! Aki-ko!" Grandfather hurls the flaming persimmons into the sky. I

watch balls of fire leap from his hands—they dip and soar, arch and flame across the

transformed sky—higher, higher, then disappear. We hold our breaths, my grandfather,

my grandmother, the gardeners, and I. We tilt our faces to the sky and wait like obedient

children.

A sound comes out of Grandfather’s throat, a growl that turns into a single

sustained note. Then, when I think he has no more air to hold it, the note climbs beyond

the scales of sound, and my grandfather’s mouth stretches like a leather pouch, wider and

11

wider, until it turns inside out. For, what he sees, what we all see—bug-eyed with fear

and fascination—are the persimmons that Grandfather Yogi has thrown into the sky, the

persimmons that—ichi! ni! san!—hurtle down at us, magnified into a thousand angry

suns.

The last note of my grandfather’s scream lingers. When I awake, the numbers of

the clock glow midnight and I am alone, grown old.

12

DAYS OF SPACIOUS DREAMS

February 1942: Fort Missoula, Montana

Dear daughter, last night a sound came out of the salt-and-pepper mountains that are

framed in the windows of my barracks. It reminded me of taiko drums in my village on

the Inland Sea. But it was only distant thunder, announcing the kind of weather

described in your American geography book. I lay on my top bunk (traded with a grocer

from California, who walks with a limp and could not manage the climb) and watched icy

rain beat against the pane, then turn into white flakes that covered the night.

After morning mess, I stomped across the compound, slapping my gloved hands

and blowing puffs of breath into the frozen air. I thought of your waking to snow last

year and how Mama let you run outside in your pajamas under your red snowsuit. This

morning I too held my face to the sky and caught snowflakes on my tongue. And thought

of old Mr. Fujita bringing round the toboggan he pulled out of his attic, and of everyone

scrambling for tires, planks and anything on which to slide down Strawberry Hill. I

remembered how your Mama and I stood at the top with Filipino cannery workers and

Japanese farmers, and the Finns and Russians from the sawmill, and how we all cheered

as Tommy O’Brien pushed off in his mother’s giant roasting pan.

Winter voices, drums from my village, thunder that woke me—last night, or last

year, or many years ago—time jumbles. Perhaps it is this wide sky place that makes it

so—bleak one moment, serenely blue the next, right now a blinding whiteness.

The letter I sent your mother today is written in Japanese and will be examined as

enemy mail. In my poor English, I write you too.

To my daughter, Kiyoko Katherine,

I am sorry for my slow letter. Mail takes many days. Thank you for letters and

painted pictures and playing cards you send me. I like very much. Montana is

13

big place and now very cold. Beautiful and strange. I will tell you everything

next time I see you. Be good girl and do everything Mama say.

Your papa, Shingo Nakamura

I do not tell you that your tempera paintings on cardboard—the Christmas tree in

the living room with our collie-dog Lady looking at my empty chair (marked “Papa”),

and your self-portrait with its single tear—were examined for enemy codes. So it is

February now and I have just received them, folded over many times and frayed at the

edges.

Last night thunder from the mountains mixed with the storm of snores in the

barracks. “Dormitory” is the word they use. We are “evacuees”: we have been

“evacuated,” as if rescued from an earthquake or flood. This camp is called a “Japanese

village.”

All is not sour, though. Now, besides drafty American showers, we have a

Japanese-style tub, which some of the men with carpentry skills have built. But this

“Japanese village” is not like my village home near the Inland Sea.

You will find Shikoku in your big Atlas book. It is the smallest of Japan’s four

main islands. You will not find my Mioyama, though, because it no longer exists.

Perhaps it was too small to matter. Once, it was the whole world to me. I wish I had told

you more.

1894: Mioyama Village, Shikoku, Japan

There is nothing in the world like the sound of taiko, giant drums made from sake barrels.

The sound rumbles like thunder from the hills. A procession dots the horizon like a tiny

string of ants, disappears into the folds of a hill, then reappears, winding its way past

terraces and fields, and onto the dusty roads of our village. The figures grow larger, the

sounds of flutes, bells, cymbals, and percussion float toward us. An ox-drawn cart pulls

the giant taiko, two men standing at opposite ends. Out of sight of the other, each man

lunges at the drum face, striking arm over arm with club-like sticks.

14

The ox keeps its steady pace, the cart sways from side to side, the drummers are

bare-chested and shiny with sweat. The beat of taiko is ancient and eternal, like the

beating of our mothers’ hearts as we tumble in their bellies.

The men and women who follow the ox carts live on the other side of the valley.

For generations they have traveled from village to village along the mountain pass,

bringing one youth, then another and another, to meet the train that will take them from

the valley to the world below—to adventure or work or war, to a new life or the end of

one. Most of the young men have never been on a train, or visited a town. They have

never before left their village.

I was eleven when my father woke me in my bed. It was dark, too early for even the

cocks to crow. I followed him to the kitchen, where he had started a fire.

“Sit, Shingo.” He pointed to the bench in front of the fire. My mother’s woolen

shawl was draped across its back. The feeble lick of flames reddened my face but left my

back and sides frozen, and I huddled closer.

My father wrapped my mother’s shawl around me. Then he spooned rice out of

the kettle resting on the hearth. Pieces of salted fish floated on top of the gleaming white

grains. We ate rice only at the New Year, and at celebrations like Aunt Tomiko’s

wedding or the birth of my cousin Hiroshi. Our every day fare was millet, which was

coarse and brown.

Father handed me his chopsticks, which he had carved out of black cherry wood.

I was astonished to be given adult chopsticks and tried earnestly to balance them between

my small fingers.

“Eat.” He poured steaming liquid over my rice—green tea—which I had never

tasted before. What’s next? I thought, and wondered if I might be offered a swallow

from the sake cask my father kept on a high shelf—it was a smaller version of the giant

barrels from which the villagers made their taiko. But nothing more came, and I was

happy to slurp the tea-flavored rice into my mouth with my father’s long, slippery

chopsticks.

15

The door slid open and my mother stood in its frame, cocooned in the quilt from

my parents’ bed. She was pregnant with my sister Azumi.

In the distance, I heard the don-don-don of the taiko.

“You will be the man of the family,” my father said. He crouched in front of me

and held my face between his callused hands. His dark eyes glimmered in the firelight.

His gaze was so intense and his grip on my face so tight that I wondered if I had done

something wrong.

“Sa”—well—he finally said, and stood abruptly. Then, in his usual brusque

manner, he gave me three quick claps on the back and turned away.

My mother walked toward my father. A corner of the quilt followed her like the

train of a wedding gown I had seen in an English picture book. My father picked up his

leather satchel and slung it over his shoulder, and my mother walked him to the door.

A band of orange was rising in the east. We heard the distant beat of taiko. My

father turned to my mother and pressed his forehead against hers. He closed his eyes.

She stretched out her arms and drew him into her cocoon. They stood this way for a long

time while I watched, astonished. Behind me, the fire crackled; a burning log crashed to

the fireplace floor. My mother opened her arms. For a moment, my father kept his hands

around my mother’s swollen belly, then stepped out from her embrace. Without looking

back, he walked toward the sound of the drums.

The drummers had stopped at the houses of many others that morning. From the

doorway, I saw Aunt Tomiko walking with her husband while my cousin Hiroshi ran

ahead. Uncle Jun stepped in with my father and the other men who were joining the

procession. Aunt Tomiko stood with my mother and watched their figures dwindle in the

distance. Hiroshi, who was eight, was called back from running after them. Later, he sat

at the hearth and stretched his mouth like a baby bird while I dropped pearly grains of

rice into it with my grown-up chopsticks.

The following year, my father’s satchel was returned by a one-legged man, who

said he had served in my father’s regiment. He told my mother that my father had died in

battle in Manchuria. All that remained of the dead—in the Chinese or the Japanese

16

uniforms of the Sino-Japanese War—were their ashes, which the one-legged man said

had been consecrated to Buddha in the purifying fires of the plains.

I used to watch my father rub his leather satchel with linseed oil. Each time, he

would return it to the wooden chest in my parents’ bedroom, unused. Wrapped in muslin,

it lay next to my mother’s wedding kimono and the tiny homemade robes of my infancy.

When my father carried the satchel with him to the front, he had inserted a bottle of

linseed oil in its side pocket. It occurred to me years later that he must have believed the

satchel would bring him luck. He had won it in a regional competition, along with a

scholarship to a school in Okayama City. He had returned to farming when a fire

destroyed most of our village, killing his father and brothers. He had only the satchel as a

reminder of what might have been. It was brought back to us by the one-legged man in

1895, in mint condition, with the bottle of linseed oil still in the side pocket.

1904-05: Russo-Japanese War

It was my turn nine years later, when military conscription swept the country in another

war, this time against Russia. Once again, drummers and musicians dotted the landscape,

stopping from village to village. I broke from the procession to stop at a roadside shrine

as I had promised my mother, then caught up with the others and made my way down the

hilly slopes to the wooden platform by the railroad tracks.

We were high in the hills—so isolated that the trains made no regular stops. We

would have to stand in the middle of the tracks and flag down our train. We heard the

whistle before we saw it, and I ran to unfurl the banner from its holder on the platform.

Afraid that the engineer wouldn’t see us in time to slow down, I leapt on the back of one

of my friends. Others jumped on the backs of their friends, and we lined the tracks,

piggy-backed and stretching out the bright red banner. When the engine finally slowed,

we hopped aboard, shouting and cheering, flushed with adventure. Most of us had never

been on anything faster than an aging plow horse. In two weeks’ time we would be

17

groaning over the railing of a troop ship to Vladivostok, then joggled across hundreds of

miles of railroad tracks on the Manchurian plains.

I had been trained to plunge a bayonet into a man’s belly. With chikara—strength and

determination—without hesitation. I had aimed my bayonet at man-sized dummies,

thrilled at the sight of sawdust pouring out of make-believe wounds. Foolish boy. Had I

thought the enemy would be filled with sawdust, that I could summon enough pretend

fury to kill a living being? I had been in battle twice, but I had shot from afar, watching

my targets fall in the distance through a haze of smoke and panic. Some of my comrades

had fought hand to hand, but I had never used my knife or bayonet.

But one day, I found myself cut off from my unit, standing ankle-deep on the

shores of an unnamed river, facing the enemy. One soldier. Where were his comrades?

I reacted, quicker than he, with my drummer’s lunge, but I winced—a moment, a fleeting

second—and the blade missed its mark, hitting and sticking in bone. That flinch, that

slightest involuntary turning away . . .

The Russian soldier looked down at his torso with an expression of disbelief. His

lips were as soft as a child’s. They formed a startled “O,” as if he was about to blow out

a candle. Dropping his weapon—I remember the sound of its splash—he shaped his

hands around the blade that protruded from his rib. Something thick gushed between his

fingers.

I held his shoulder, gripped my rifle and tugged, but the blade remained. I pulled

hand over hand, and he came toward me like a giant doll. I unlatched the blade from my

rifle and pulled again—he drew closer still, my hands around his hands now, my shoulder

leaned into his. Even now, it seems like a dream, in slow motion and preternaturally

bright.

He lifted his head, a look of surprise tattooed across his face. He was not much

taller than I, but muscular, and I saw that his face had not yet hardened into maturity, that

we were nearly the same age. His cap slid off his head. His hair was the shade of

autumn wheat. The cap tumbled to his shoulder. I caught it and fit it back on his head.

He gave a nod. His eyes were a most startling blue.

18

His hands still clutched the blade. Again, he lowered his head and looked at his

body as if trying to understand the blade, the blood, the dark-eyed boy who held him. He

said, “Oh. Oh.” Over and over. “Oh. “Oh.”

“Please, I’ll help you.” I was sobbing, cradling him now, soaked in his blood.

We lay in the shallows; the water burbled around us. I wiped my face on the rough twill

of my sleeve—I did not want my tears or my spittle or the mucus that ran from my nose

to soil his face. I cupped river water and dribbled it between his lips. Black blood seeped

out of the corner of his mouth. “Sorry, so sorry,” I said. He murmured something in

reply. We did not speak each other’s language. His eyes were as clear as the water that

sparkled around us. His lips parted again, this time without a sound. Then he dropped

his hands, and the blade slid easily from his body. I carried him to the reeds along the

bank. I folded his cap and placed it under his head. He wore a chain around his neck on

which hung a small gold cross. I rinsed his hands and folded them across his chest,

across the gash in his uniform. I put the cross between his still warm fingers. His hands

were large and callused, with prominent knuckles, a peasant’s hands. I wondered who

waited for his return.

Later, I made my way across the plain, in search of my unit. I stumbled across a

battlefield strewn with the carcasses of horses. They lay on their backs, hooves frozen in

midair, entrails streaming out of swollen bellies. Bodies of men stretched across the

crumpled ground, in blue uniforms and olive brown uniforms, limbs severed, faces

grimacing. A breeze fanned some embers. Flames suddenly shot up, a vivid orange

through the thickness of smoke and sulfur. The screams of men and animals had long

since subsided. The sun had disappeared from the sky. I was walking through Buddhist

hell.

I came to a windswept hill over which blue butterflies spiraled overhead. They

were everywhere, on the ground too, torn wings, double-winged, soft blue, fluttering

around the maimed and the still. I reached into the air and brought one down. It was a

torn blue page, scorched around its edges. I picked a double-winged one off the ground.

A small booklet. It fit in the palm of my hand, its windswept pages flapping. On one

page a photograph, on another dark swirls of writing. The identification booklet of a

19

Russian infantrymen. I wondered if such a booklet would be returned to the mother of

the youth I had killed.

We had been trained by German and British officers; the Germans had introduced

our unit to machine guns. I had seen the blue eyes of Westerners in months of training

and serving on the front. But the blue of my Russian soldier’s eyes, the glistening waters

of the river bank in the morning light, and the sounds of his “Oh,” “Oh,” stay with me.

Sometimes I dream that I am fighting the Russian when a hand clasps my shoulder and I

turn to face my father, who is holding a bayonet. My dreams are filled with bayonet

blades glistening in the sun, the burble of blood and water, taiko drums and war drums,

blue eyes and brown eyes, and maggots that turn into blue butterflies.

1906: Shikoku, Japan

I had little knowledge of politics or history and my dreams never leapt beyond the Inland

Sea. But war changed all our horizons. In spite of victory over Russia and increasing

domination in Asia, Japan was stricken with unemployment and inflation. The

government was encouraging employment abroad, and labor contractors hawked jobs like

spun sugar at a carnival.

Every day the big town newspapers carried stories of how a Mr. Sabuhara from

Akita Prefecture had become “the greatest flower grower west of the Rocky Mountains,”

or that a Kenji Moriyama of Osaka was the “Lettuce King of California.” News of

American successes was second only to news of our victory over Russia. And didn’t the

Americans love us too? The New York Times called us “the valiant little nation that

vanquished the Russian bear.”

I had been home from the Russian front six months when the government official came to

our village. He had stopped at a dozen hamlets and arrived with a military band. At the

morning ceremony in the village square, the band played the national anthem and we

saluted the flag of the rising sun. The mayor of Okayama City, the governor of the

20

prefecture, and heads of five samurai families greeted him and his entourage. After the

band played a series of rousing marches and the crowd shouted “Banzai!” the official

from Tokyo gave a speech on the recent victory over Russia, the past victory over China,

and the virtues of national service. In closing, he told us that once again we had a duty to

perform.

“First sons, stay in Japan and be men of Japan.” His coat flapped in the wind.

“Second sons, go abroad with great ambition and be men of the world!”

Later, I approached the official, a stiff-backed man with a thin mustache that

drooped over twitching jaws.

“Pardon, sir, I’m not a second son, but—”

“What are you?”

“An only son. There is only my mother and sister. We lost my father—”

“Yes, yes, in the China war. We won.”

“The harvest is bad. My mother cannot pay the taxes.

“Hmm.”

“Will I find work in America?”

“You read?” He held up several government booklets, sounding off the titles as

he slapped each one into my hand:

Guidance for Going to America.

Up to Date Policy for Going to America.

The New Way to Go to America.”

“Sign here, my boy.” He snatched back the books before I could open them. One

title, though, was familiar. A man in our unit had carried a wrinkled copy of Guidance

for Going to America with him throughout the war. He was Jinzo Ota, from Kanazawa

Prefecture, but we called him “American Fever.” Even during maneuvers, marching

across frozen tundra, or recovering bodies from rotting battlefields, he talked of nothing

but money growing on trees, of lumps of gold waiting to be plucked from the ground, of

men of destiny who became millionaires overnight. On leave in Yokohama, he had

dragged me to a moving picture. We sat in the dark of the Golden Horse Theater where

notes from a tinny piano melded with the whirr of the projector. Men on horseback

21

silently moved hundreds of head of cattle. When the camera pulled away, they were

silhouetted against the vast American sky.

Five days after our discharge from the Imperial Army, Jinzo Ota sailed to

America on the Kinshu Maru, and I boarded the first of many trains returning me to my

home village.

1907: Mioyama

“Shingo, it’s time,” my mother said.

“Coming, coming.” I tried to fasten my new American trousers.

“So many buttons, not like the good old Japanese momohiki,” said my cousin. He

tugged with forced humor at the drawstrings of his loose pants. I finished fumbling with

my trousers, and Hiroshi held out the frock coat.

“Maa, it takes two people to put on one suit of clothes,” he said, as I struggled

into the tight sleeves. “Americans must have much time to waste.”

“Shingo, hurry, won’t you?” my mother called from the hall. “You will miss the

train. If you miss the train, you will miss the boat.”

“Undeniable logic,” said Hiroshi, but I was grappling with my collar.

“The beast is choking me.”

Mother slid open the shoji panel and entered the room. “That’s because you’ve

worn it since yesterday.”

“You wore it to bed?” Hiroshi slapped his forehead.

“Don’t worry, it didn’t wrinkle.” I gave him a shove. “I slept sitting up.”

We forced our laughter.

Everything I wore smelled of newness and leave-taking. Everything said and

done seemed more clever, more important, than anything that had ever been said or done

before. I knew I would never forget that morning. My mother in her gray kimono,

standing on tiptoe to fold a white handkerchief into my breast pocket, my cousin making

his blustery jokes. We busied ourselves, avoiding each other’s eyes.

22

Hiroshi dropped elaborately to his knees and wiped my shoes with the heels of his

hands. “Subarashii! Magnificent! Just like an American!”

I had grown up with this comical cousin, my junior by two-and-a-half years. We

had lost our fathers in the Sino-Japanese war. When tuberculosis took Aunt Tomiko, he

came to live with us. He had escaped the conscription of ‘04 that had swept me into the

Imperial Army, but three years of poor harvests had forced him to find work in Okayama

City. Our village was disappearing. In the coming years the young men would leave

Mioyama, signing work contracts that took them to places called California and Oregon,

or to plantations in the Territory of Hawaii. But Hiroshi said he was a son of Japan and

would never leave.

Parting had made us awkward. Having run out of jokes, he worried the brim of

my new derby hat and frowned at the floor. My mother opened the shoji panel and left

the room. Her slippers rustled smoothly along the hall, stopped, then resumed their silken

path. When she returned, she held something wrapped in cloth.

“Sa,” said Hiroshi, finally. I’ll take your things, Shingo.” He set down my hat

and picked up my father’s satchel.

My mother looked after him as he plodded down the hall. She extended her arms.

“What’s this?”

“It’s tachiyaki. Good luck bean paste. To eat on the train.”

“Tachiyaki again, Mother?” I said. “You made me tachiyaki the night I left for

the Russian front.”

“And didn’t it work?” she said. “It brought you home.” I thought again of my

Russian soldier. In the distance, the sound of drums.

She proffered the package, bowing her head between her outstretched arms. I

bowed in return. The sea of sounds swept closer—the solid boom of the taiko,

syncopated by smaller drums, cymbals, bells, wooden clappers, and soaring above them

the piercing notes of the bamboo flute, until both loudness and silence vibrated in my

ears. I looked at the gray that threaded my mother’s hair, the small wooden combs that

extended like small wings from the sides of her head, the silvery tones of her diamond-

patterned kimono. I saw the tachiyaki package wrapped in raw silk, painted with the

23

design of our village, a mountain peering from blue-gray mist and behind it the glowing,

rising sun.

“Shingo, Shingo!” Your aunt Azumi, who was about the age you are now, swung

open the front door. “The villagers are here!”

They crowded into the courtyard. Azumi tugged at the sleeves of my Western

suit.

“May I go with you to the end of the village? May I, may I?”

Suddenly, she was confronted by the full force of my newness. “Oh, Shingo, how

handsome you look! I wish I could go to America too!”

Eager hands pulled me out the door to the sound of the drums.

“Sayonara, Okasan. Sayonara.” Goodbye, Mother, goodbye.

“You will be sure to stop at the shrine?” she shouted.

“I’ll have time before the train.”

Hiroshi ran alongside me; Azumi held my hand. Behind us, neighbors balanced

my steamer trunk above their heads. Wearing my derby hat and swinging my father’s

leather satchel, I ran toward the road. I was young—and although I was a dutiful son and

would say my prayers at the village shrine for a safe journey and return, although I

wanted nothing more than to live among the paddies and groves of my village—on that

day I was seized by American fever as surely as my friend Jinzo Ota had been.

When I looked back, my mother was standing at the gate. She held the silk-

wrapped box that contained the tachiyaki, my good luck meal for the train ride to

Yokohama Harbor. In my youthful exuberance, I had left it behind.

“Don’t worry, Okasan, I’ll come home in five years!” I shouted. But the giant

drums drowned out my words.

At the roadside shrine, I opened the gate and drank from the wooden dipper attached to

the small well at the entry. The water was cold, with a subtle sweetness and perfume, as

if nectar had been released from deep within the ground. What adventures will be part of

24

me when I taste this water again, I wondered. Five years, I had signed a labor contract to

work in America for five years!

I stooped and untied the laces of my tight Western shoes. They were scuffed and

dusty from the morning’s run. Slipping them off, I entered the shrine and bowed. I

pulled the rope on the clapper of the brass bell, clapped three times, and dropped to my

knees, forehead to the ground between my outstretched arms.

“Kami-sama,” I prayed. “Before you is a man who is traveling far away. Bless

this trip and give me good health. Look after my mother and my sister and keep them

safe. Keep safe, too, the mother in Russia who waits for her son.”

From within the shrine, I heard the whistle of the train rounding the pass. I

quickly walked to the sand garden at the edge of the shrine and scooped a handful of sand

into one of the small woven bamboo boxes set out for visitors.

“I will take these sands from the shrine to remind me of this day, and I promise to

return in five years.”

I placed the bamboo box in the side pocket of my father’s satchel, then rang the bell,

bowed, and struggled into my Western shoes.

April 1942: Fort Missoula, Montana

Daughter, last night, I dreamt of my cousin Hiroshi when we were boys and our fathers

were still alive. We had piled into our ox-cart with our mothers, who were sisters, and

rode to the next village for the Boys’ Day festival. My mother was large with Azumi.

Our fathers took turns driving the oxen. It was May 1894, three months before they left

us.

Hiroshi was strong for his age. He won many competitions that day, even the

kendo tournament—fencing with bamboo sticks—which was for older boys. “He’s taken

every prize except oratory and poetry-reciting,” said his father. Everyone laughed at the

idea of Hiroshi reciting poetry.

25

Later, your grandmother chided me for not taking part in the games and activities.

I had stood at the taiko pavilion all day, transfixed by the drummers, who had gathered

from different parts of the valley.

“The sound of the drums has bewitched him,” said my father. He regarded me

with his penetrating look.

The next year, the festival was held in our village. It was a month after the one-legged

man had visited us. Every day since I had learned of my father’s death, I had worked his

section of the field. Every night, I silently ate my supper under my mother’s concerned

gaze, then withdrew to the back of the house where I took down my father’s satchel from

its hiding place. I refused Hiroshi’s company, refused my baby sister’s playful prodding.

Night after night, I rubbed my father’s satchel with oil from the bottle in its side pocket,

rubbing and rubbing as if it was Aladdin’s magic lamp.

“Come, Shingo,” Aunt Tomiko took my arm. “Come out of the house.”

We piled into the ox cart our fathers had driven the year before. Aunt Tomiko

drove us to the pavilion in the village square; my mother carried baby Azumi in a sling

on her back.

The head drummer was a man from our village who had returned from the

Manchurian front. He handed me his sticks. My slow strokes made dull, paltry sounds

but the head drummer stood on the other side, following me with small syncopations;

soon we caught each other’s rhythm, anticipated each other’s pauses. Invisible to one

another over the barrel-shaped drum, we balanced on each other’s breath, hovered on the

echoes of our beats. Coordinating, countering, interpolating, we created a medley of

sounds—on the drum face, the metal lining, the wooden sides. We threw our sticks in the

air, spun around and caught them, lunged repeatedly at the center, and stroked the tight

skin, arm over arm over arm.

Late in the afternoon, I whipped off my headband and flung it across the stage.

My hair hung over my eyes, stuck to my face, slithered across my shoulders. Sweat

plastered the cotton robe to my back. I pounded uncontrollably, blinded by tears and

26

rage. The others let me play, took turns partnering, tried to keep up. Hiroshi brought me

black bean cakes, his eyes round with worry. The food sat on the floor of the pavilion

and hardened in the sun. The man who had given me his sticks sprinkled water on my

neck and back; it pooled at my feet and evaporated in the heat. At sunset, the crowd

began to disperse; musicians and drummers packed their instruments. Only the one drum

was left, only my family waited. I drummed into the night. Hiroshi lay with his head in

Aunt Tomiko’s lap; my mother nursed my sister. I pounded until my legs gave way, until

my hands had to be pried from the sticks and I was carried to the soft hay of our ox-cart.

I slept for two days, full of fever alternating with chills. When I woke I could not lift my

arms and for many days was of no use in the fields.

How strange life is that I have not been home since the day I promised to return in five

years. And though at first I sent money no matter how hard the earning, it was Hiroshi

who returned to Mioyama to pay the land taxes, who became the man of our family, the

true son and real brother. When times of sickness, injury, and no wages came, I did not

write, I did not send money home. I was ashamed. After twelve years of following the

seasons, scratching out work in Oregon, Idaho, California, and all over Washington State,

I came to our island in Puget Sound. I met Japanese farmers who had bought land under

the names of their American-born children—worthless land, the whites thought—and

cleared, dug, felled trees, dynamited stumps, and tilled the soil for strawberries. An

impossible crop, they said—too delicate, growing season too short. Which was true. We

took what we could.

I worked for the strawberry farmers and became one myself. I married your

Mama, and finally, I wrote home. Come to America, land of opportunity, I said. Hiroshi

and your obasan said they belonged to Japan. But they sent your Aunt Azumi, the little

girl whose eyes had sparkled when she said, “I want to go to America too!” She was a

young lady when she came to us. I had missed her growing up years. Will I now miss

yours?

27

The village is gone. Trains no longer come to our valley. Gone too is your

obasan. Azumi is in California with your Uncle James and their two boys. Across the

ocean, Hiroshi lives in the big city of Nagasaki, with his wife and three children. For

years, we have talked of visiting.

I think about your grandmother’s tachiyaki. “For luck and safe return,” she had

said. Will I be deported from Montana to a place that no longer exists? What will

become of you, with your Japanese face and American heart? What of Azumi and her

hakujin husband, and her boys who are half and half? Will the Sons of the Golden West

torch my brother-in-law’s newspaper office again? Did the FBI agent who thought your

drawing of Puget Sound was an enemy map feel shame when you told him it was your

fifth grade geography assignment? I am fifty-six years old and have been in this country

more than half my lifetime. I have made other men rich, picking their crops, laying ties,

felling trees, catching and canning their fish. Yet, I cannot own property, I cannot vote.

Today I am called enemy.

March 27, 1942: Puget Island, Washington

Dear Husband,

President Roosevelt has signed an order to remove us from the West Coast. Our

day of leaving is April first. A joke on us, don’t you think?

Soldiers who have come to the island will help us load what we can carry to their

Army trucks. They are boys, really; very polite. They have never seen a Japanese

before.

We don’t know where we are going or what to wear, so I have filled our steamer

trunk with clothing for an assortment of climates. I know you will laugh at me, Shingo,

but you know that I like to be prepared: you can take off what is too hot or heavy, but

you cannot put on what you have not thought to bring. I have packed rain boots and long

underwear side by side with short sleeves and the sun hat I used to wear in the strawberry

fields. Kiyoko wants to be called Katherine now. She is unhappy that she cannot bring

28

her camera or radio: they are forbidden contraband. We are to take only what we can

carry.

The Army has reopened the old ferry dock on the other side of the island to avoid

public attention. From Seattle, we’ll be taken to our destination by train—where, we

don’t know. Jerry, with the Japanese American Citizens League, says some kind of camp

is being built for us. Whether it will be for just us islanders, we do not know. . . .

After I write this letter, I will sweep our house and leave it clean. It has been a

good house and I will say thank you when I close the door. Domo arigato gosai masu.

May 1942: Fort Missoula, Montana

Your mother’s letter surprises me. Although several parts are blacked out, there is much

that I would not have expected to pass the censors. That ours is the first community to be

removed, that we are a test case because of the nearby submarine base. That we are in

conflict about whether we should allow ourselves to go so willingly.

Tommy O’Brien asked Mama,“Who do you want to win the war?” Maa. She

was midwife at his birth. Last year he was a boy riding down Strawberry Hill in his

mother’s roasting pan, knees clutched to his chest. Now he has taken the ferry to Seattle

and returns a United States soldier. The line at the recruiting station wound around the

block, he said.

“Japan’s your country, isn’t it?” This, he asked of Mama. What your Mama

writes next is blacked out.

Daughter, in your letter you write that soldiers have come to our island from New

Jersey, and that they are nice. You tell me your friends follow these soldiers, impressed

with their boots, their helmets and bayonets, their funny accents, and that they have

hammered notices on the doors of the community center, the churches, and the post

office.

Six days, the notices say. Six days for Mama and the others to leave Puget

Sound. To sell and pack and store and say good-bye to our dog Lady, to tell Mr.

29

Kowalski to dig up Mama’s camellias and rhododendrons for her garden, and your piano

teacher to take the Spinet. It is one month since Mama’s letter, and I wonder where you

are.

Your aunt Azumi writes that instructions are to leave Berkeley in mid-April,

destination unknown. James remains behind with the boys. His newspaper has suffered

many losses of subscriptions. He is, of course, called “Jap lover.”

One New Jersey soldier told Mama that he thinks he’ll be shipped out soon. He

doesn’t know where. On what front will he use his bayonet, fire his gun, face his enemy?

The Russians are now American allies. So are the Chinese. And the Japanese and the

Germans, who once were, are not.

In my dream, the young men from New Jersey are standing at attention on the ferry dock,

their bayonets fixed to their guns. I walk up to them. The blades glisten in the sun. I

point and say, “I once used one of those.” A soldier steps out of line: “I know,” he says.

It is the blue-eyed Russian boy of many years ago. How is it that I am old and he is still

nineteen? And then I remember that he is dead and I have lived thirty-seven years

longer. Every man in the line does an about face, every one of them is my Russian

soldier. At an invisible signal, they slowly advance on me, bayonets forward. The

waters of Puget Sound sparkle behind them, the ferry pulls into the dock—the dream is

never finished.

In another dream, drummers from the Buddhist temple in Seattle and churches in

White River, Green River, Fall River, and Snoqualmie Valley congregate at the old ferry

dock. In the grassy lot in front of the dock, a street dance begins—bon odori, which is

celebrated in August to commemorate the spirits of the dead—but this, after all, is a

dream and anything is possible. A procession of Army trucks pulls into the lot and

disgorges its luggage and passengers. The drummers and musicians play while the ferry

sails into view.

All who love taiko dance in a human chain on the lawn, stepping in and out, back

and forth to the beat of the drum, arms linked, the circle ever widening, ever inclusive.

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We board—for in this dream I am reunited with all my family, on opposite shores, the

living and the dead—and I stand on deck, listening to the don-don-don of the giant taiko,

watching the circle of dancers stretch across the ground below.

Kiyoko Katherine, I woke from this dream and pulled out my father’s satchel

from under the bunk bed. It was scratched and faded, the lock rusty, but still sturdy. I

ran my hand inside the side pocket and took out the small bamboo box I had placed there

years ago. It had flattened to the shape of a pancake, but it still contained the sands of the

shrine.

I carried the box into the bright light of the compound and faced the snow-packed

mountains of Montana. I said a prayer, then poured the sands into my palm and offered

them to the sky. The winds came and the tiny grains swirled away, light as ghosts. It

took only a blink of time.

I think of you every day and wait every day to be with you and Mama.

Your loving papa Shingo Nakamura, in his dream letter to his daughter.

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PEACH GIRL

for Tomo Shoji

When I was a child in internment camp, there was a lady who would tell us stories—old

ones and new ones, and ones we didn’t even know were true. This lady was about my

mother’s age but she seemed much older, maybe because she was so mysterious. In

those days, everybody knew everybody else—in the Bay area where we came from, or

Seattle where my cousins lived, or even from the old country (the Koyamas, the

Okimotos and the Watanabes from Hiroshima, the Matsumotos and the Sakamotos from

Osaka, the Katos, Haras, and Kojimas from the Tokyo area)—but I never met anyone

who knew Momo-san, or knew where she came from, or even where she went after the

war.

Some of the kids on our block said she was a witch, and some called her crazy,

but that was only the drippings from grownup talk—half-heard phrases and sudden

silences and funny looks. Manzanar was a barbed-wire town of over 10,000 people.

Fear, gossip, and rumors simmered in a broth of routine and boredom—of work and

school, curfew and lights-out, of contraband searches, censored mail and, always, the

lines. Standing in line to eat. Standing in line for supplies. Standing in line to do the

laundry, to take a shower, to go to the bathroom.

But my three-and-a-half years of camp were the most carefree of my life. I

metamorphosed from a slightly pampered only child to a scabs-‘n-scratches tomboy,

running from morning mess to curfew with a gang of rowdy pals. The greatest disaster of

our parents’ lives, and of all the adults around us, had created the most unique,

adventurous and mixed-up times of ours.

We weren’t bad kids, just mischief makers. The kind that played tag up and down

the mess hall aisles, planted sand sandwiches on the chow line, rolled the rice into

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snowballs, made spitballs out of Wonder Bread—and once, when we let the pigs out of

their pens, caused a camp-wide commotion. In our barracks school, we were obedient

and studious, and our white teachers praised us. But to the first generation Issei, we were

wild Injun or ju’nile delinquent or go-hell-in-hand-basket. It was the forties and it was

wartime. We were second generation. Nisei. Larger, louder, slang-talking, bubblegum-

blowing, jitter-bugging, baseball-crazy. American-born and bred.

Most of our families were too distracted or defeated to deal with us. Our

community leaders were in enemy alien camps, our families’ farms and homes and

businesses forsaken. My parents were both Issei. My dad wanted to return to Japan, my

mother refused to go. He worked on a maintenance crew that took him away most of the

day, but whenever they were together they had terrible rows. In the mornings, I dashed

out the door of our tiny barracks apartment and didn’t return until lights out. Mama spent

most of her time trying to take care of Granny, who wandered around camp looking for

the silk purse she’d lost in 1910 on the passage to America.

No one said it aloud, but we knew that being Japanese was lousy. Real

Americans hated us. It was a sneak attack, god dammit. The general in charge of the

round-up said once a Jap, always a Jap—it was in the newspapers. We believed it, even

as we wanted it not to be true. We were American, we were foreign, we were betwixt

and between.

Study hard, we were told. Get good grades. Speak English. Be two-hundred

percent American. But we also had to have gaman, perseverance, and giri, strength. We

also had to be modest and humble—unobtrusive—because the nail that sticks up gets

hammered down. And always, always, we had to practice on: respect for elders.

The woman we called Momo-san was teacher’s helper to the whites who came

from outside, church people or Quakers or young teachers just out of normal school

who’d volunteered for jobs the government advertised. Some of them thought they were

coming out West to teach on an Indian reservation.

Momo means “Peach.” I don’t remember her last name or even if she was a Miss

or a Mrs. I only know that her stories were Japanese and American and everything in

between. Even the kids who poked fun at her kept coming back to listen. She was like a

33

pebble thrown into a pond, creating ever-widening circles. After Manzanar, I took her

stories with me into life.

1942: Manzanar. I am under the spell of the Peach Lady. She sits on a wooden crate in the

clearing behind our barracks, playing her bamboo flute. Two soldiers are silhouetted in the

guard tower above us; the barbed wire fence makes a long shadow on the saffron-colored

ground. Blue-gray peaks of the Sierra Nevadas punctuate the horizon.

Momo-san sets down her flute. She beats her drum, and begins.

My father danced on logs. He balanced on the spines of giant cedars, blue spruces, and

Noble firs, leaping from log to log until they floated freely to the mill. A log in water’s a

treacherous thing, you know. Rolls as fast as a rattler can strike. But my pa was quick and

lithe. The most daring log dancer in the Pacific Northwest.

Those were the days of hand-logging when you felled a tree near tidewater, limbed

it, bucked it into lengths, and hauled it to the millstream with oxen. There was plenty of

work for us Japanese then; the hakujin men were fighting in the Great War. Those were

the long ago days.

From the time I was seven til turning twelve, no one could tell if I was a boy or girl

under my muddy dungarees—hair as black and free, skin as berry brown as the Cowlitz

and Chehalis kids I played with. The camp ladies said I was a wild American Indian, or an

Ainu, like they have in Japan. I never paid no mind.

I was nine when Pa put me on the end of the crosscut saw. He taught me to set the

handles, chop rounds for firewood, hook the kerosene bottle into the bark, and clean pitch

off the blade. Don’t ride the saw, he said. No pushing or tugging, wait til it comes to you.

A give-‘n-a-take, a me-‘n-a-you. The song of the two-man saw.

Six days a week I’d go with the crew (that is, til the busybody ladies of Onalaska

told the foreman I ought to be in school). We started before dawn, skin itching from

woolen underwear, caulk boots laced to the shins (mine had to be stuffed with socks). The

34

woods were scary before the sun sliced through, spooky quiet before the jays started in. I

was in charge of my father’s lunch bucket and making camp for the crew—building the fire

for pan biscuits and coffee, divvying up hardtack and deer jerky. I was very useful.

Later, I would lie on a bed of cedar boughs, surrounded by the zzzzzz of saws, part

daydreaming, part dreading the coming silence. A tall one creaks a long time before it’s

felled, you know. The top sways one way—eeeeeek—then the other—eeeek-eeeeeeeek.

The irreversible sound of ripping.

The ground shakes, then the noise catches up. The roar stays in your ears a long time.

The dust swells up like a tidal wave. When the air clears, the tree lies on the spoiled

ground, splinters from the undercut sticking out of the stump, the sap running thick.

Sometimes the men would pose for the company camera. They stand, dwarfed by the giant

log, smiling like big game hunters, holding their saws as if they were elephant guns.

We went everywhere together. South to the Oregon border, east to the wheat fields of the

Okanagon, all the way up to the land of the Macahs in Washington State, where bald eagles

soared across the empty sky and you could see Canada from the tip of Neah Bay. I was my

father’s little helper; everyone said so. We were all we had and all I ever wanted.

Once, on Skid Road in Seattle, I saw a street-corner preacher dressed all in black.

His eyes burned in their dark sockets and his straggly white beard shook as he yelled “How

the mighty have fallen! How the mighty have fallen!” When he pointed at my father, I

began to cry. But Pa took me away and we sat on a bench near a statue of Chief Seattle

and he sang me a song about a sailor on the China Sea who misses his home—China no

yoru: China nights. We fed the pigeons in the square and listened to horse hooves on the

cobblestone streets and ship horns out in the bay. China nights. Purple nights. The sailor

in the song never returns home.

All I remember about my mother are sensations, cries, whispers. She was a young

girl from Pa’s village on the Inland Sea, and he had loved her all his life. In 1905, twenty-

two people from the village left, husbands and wives and ambitious single men like my

father. For a year, he wrote back letters full of beautiful lies. Promise poems, I thought,

35

when I read them, grown. But to my mother, who’d believed that gold nuggets lay on the

ground and money hung from trees, they were terrible lies. “Dream-killer,” she screamed,

and she never forgave him.

She wasn’t for the hard life. The camp wives had warned my father she was too

young, too pampered, the only daughter of the mayor of the village. America was no life

for her. “Save your money and go back,” the husbands said. “Marry her at home.” But he

wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t live without her. He must have his Sono. Then his luck

would change; he would make his fortune. She was the angel of his destiny.

They stood on opposite shores of the ocean and said their wedding vows, my father

dressed in a borrowed suit at the courthouse in Libertyville, my mother in Shinto bridal

robes at the shrine of her village. Her father the mayor drove her to Yokohama harbor in a

fancy carriage, and she boarded the America Maru with a trunk full of silk kimonos. Her

first sight of America as she sailed into San Francisco Bay was of a city smoldering in

ruins. Heaps of ash wreathed the shore. It was April 20, 1906, two days after the fire that

followed the great quake.

She was the last to leave the ship. My father paced the dock, scanning every face,

showing her photograph—“Have you seen her? Was she on board?”—until she appeared,

a tiny figure swathed in black, at the top of the gangplank. “Sono!” he shouted, but the

ship’s horn drowned out his voice. He ran toward the gangplank, waving his hat, shouting,

senseless with joy. She stood, one hand on the rail, the other lightly lifting the hem of her

black cloak. For a moment, he was afraid she would turn and run back into the ship, but,

slowly, she began to advance. Her face was framed by the hood of the cloak, her pallor

intensified by its darkness. She was, he said, a pale angel descending from heaven. She

was nineteen years old.

All this was told to me by others: Mrs. Okada, who’d been on the America Maru,

or people from Log City, or others who knew my parents in a stream of boarding houses,

factory jobs, labor camps. For my mother is like a dream to me. It was Mrs. Okada who

told me how, one by one, the splendid kimonos my mother had brought with her were lost,

stolen or sold as my parents made their way through migrant worker camps, fishing

villages, mines, and lumber mills.

36

“After you born, she stop talking,” Mrs. Okada said. “Your papa give you her

name. But she no hold you, no give you milk from her chichi.”

My father took me to a Muckleshoot girl whose baby had died. When they put me

to her breast, I suckled hungrily but she turned her face to the wall. She was fifteen and

wanted her own baby to croon her Indian songs to. Kawaiso, poor thing. Mrs. Okada told

me how I clung to her teat, my face a fist of rage, how when the girl tore her nipple from

my mouth the milk splashed across her empty belly.

My mother ran away with the labor contractor who had brought my father and his

neighbors to America. I was four. I only remember how my father wept, how he burned

her pictures and cursed her name. How, late into the night, he roamed our cabin ranting

about kimonos. He would buy ones more beautiful than any she had ever owned. Dollars

would sprout from trees. He would pick them for her like flowers. But he was drunk,

raving to a child. This was how it was for many nights. In the mornings he worked in the

woods, felled trees, danced on logs. When the weeping and the night talking stopped, he

never mentioned my mother again. But she was echoed in every utterance of my name.

So—hasty and quick; no—wild, a field or moor. Syllables of escape.

Log City is no more and the endless forest is gone, but the Little Orient section of Log City

in Washington State is where I lived longest with my father.

Mrs. Okada was there, with her twin boys, Lincoln and Jefferson. She had come to

America as a picture bride, married by proxy in Japan to a stranger, who had sent his

photograph to a matchmaker. Mr. Okada and his three brothers worked at the mill. Mrs.

Okada was camp bookkeeper.

Kobo Shoji was there with his mother, a widow lady. His father had been crushed

between two logs on the Toledo River. Mrs. Shoji and her husband’s sister did the sewing

and camp laundry. Everyone called them Sho-ichi and Sho-ni. Shoji One and Shoji Two.

We went to school with the town children, but we lived in the Little Orient section

of Log City. There were Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos; some men had wives. We

four—Kobo Shoji, the Okada twins, and I—were the only children. I was the only girl.

All the while, my father kept drinking at night and dancing on logs by day. When

37

the men returned from the woods or the millstream, they ate silently in the mess-tent, then

gathered in the shed behind the bunkhouse to drink sake, rye whiskey, sarsaparilla.

Mrs. Okada led me away when they began their drunken songs. “No place for

child,” she said. She was large and round, with a loud voice.

Mrs. Okada and the Shojis hated the rowdy ladies who came from town on Saturday

nights. They knew that the signs in the taverns and brothels of Log City read, “No Caulks,

No Yellows,” and that there would be a line outside Little Orient’s bunkhouse.

We were told to stay indoors on Saturdays and not to linger after school. “Never

go no place alone,” Mrs. Okada said. “Never talk to stranger.” She waved a local

newspaper at me, its headlines flashing: “Chinaman lynched in Pasco.” “Jap Grocer’s

Throat Cut.” “Picture Brides Assaulted at Tacoma Wharf.”

The hakujin kids taunted me at school, and I fought back. The teacher always

punished me, never the whites. I began to skip school. Without warning, the truant

officer came to camp, and I saw how our tough “bull-of-the woods” foreman shriveled in

the presence of a white man.

“Never make trouble with hakujin,” Mrs. Okada said. “Or foreman fire your

papa.” I’d be sent to the Indian orphanage, a Catholic boarding school where the children

were forbidden to speak their language, to practice their tribal ways.

By the time I was twelve, my father was spending his nights behind the

bunkhouse. Some mornings Mr. Okada and his brothers carried him home. I’d rush to

the mess-tent to save his breakfast, but he’d only down bitter coffee. When he started for

the woods, I ran after him with his lunch bucket.

The days when I’d go out with the crew were gone.

One chilly pre-dawn, the summer I was twelve, we woke to the clang of the cook’s

triangle, a surprising sound, for the cook had left to mine copper in Colorado. A new

cook had been hired, a Chinese from the big town of Tacoma, but he wasn’t expected

until the end of summer.

38

The loggers staggered out of the bunkhouse, scratching themselves like bears

waking from hibernation. They marched to the outhouses and washed at the pumps to the

clang-clang-clang of the triangle. Mrs. Okada and the two Shojis, who had taken on

cook’s duties but had somehow overslept that morning, emerged from their cabins and

sniffed the air. We followed our noses to the mess-tent.

Fresh baked bread and bowls of berry jam sat on the long tables. Rice too, and

soy sauce, and pickled radishes. The floorboards had been scrubbed and the tables and

benches bleached clean.

The men shuffled in, disbelieving. An old woman, the size of a ten-year-old,

passed silently from man to man, pouring coffee, spooning mush, heaping pork chops,

links and bacon onto eager plates. When the foreman strode over to ask her business

there, she stared up at him so hard he removed his hat. “Eat,” she said, and put a platter

of potatoes in his hand. Our bull-of-the-woods sat meekly and ate.

She was an odd sight. Her hair was as white and wispy as snowdrifts, her mouth

a cavern of blackened teeth. When she smiled, her face seemed to fold into a single

wrinkle. But in repose, her face became as smooth as a bride’s, the color of old gold, a

faint blush across the high mound of her cheeks.

The tent filled with the sounds of forks against metal plates, of smacking and

slurping lips, of belches and groans of satisfaction. All the while, Mrs. Okada and the

Shojis stood like wallflowers in their woolen bathrobes, arms crossed across their chests.

But when Madam Murasaki brought them tea in gold-rimmed cups as delicate as

eggshells, they sipped from them as if they were grand ladies at the Imperial court.

Her name was Madam Murasaki and she was very old.

“How old?” asked Lincoln Okada.

“Very, very old,” she said.

“How come you’re so little?” asked Jefferson.

“So you won’t be afraid.”

39

“Where do you come from?” asked Kobo Shoji.

“East of the sun, west of the moon.” That’s the way she talked.

She told us tales of old Japan—of Kintaro, the boy who lived with the bears,

about the lady who lived under the sea, or of the golden days of the samurai warriors.

Sometimes about Junzo the Giant Killer, who climbed the bamboo shoot as high as the

sky and stole the golden chicken. Or the princess who slept on a peapod. Even Paul

Bunyan became a Japanese folk hero, with Paul and his blue ox, Baby-san, saving

villages from bandits or typhoons or quakes.

One day she leaned close and whispered to me: “Your mama was a princess in

the wrong fairy tale.” How did she know about my mother? Who’d gossiped? Who’d

blamed my Pa?

“Don’t worry,” she chuckled, her skin wrinkling like fine rawhide. “I know the

type.” She unfolded her furoshiki, the scarf she told us a prince named Genji had given

her, and took from it an ivory pipe.

“This tale has giants and roughnecks,” she said, knocking the pipe against the side

of her crate, then filling it. “Good people mostly, but unsmooth, so to your mama they

looked the way Paul Bunyan would look to that princess who slept on a peapod.”

She flicked her long thumbnail against a wooden match and lit the pipe. Between

puffs of smoke, she cackled and stomped her feet. Balls of dust engulfed her in a golden

cloud.

Who was this Madam Murasaki and how had she found our camp?

“Something fishy about that one,” said Shoji One. We were hanging laundry

behind the mess-tent.

“Sometime I think I’m going to remember something,” said Shoji Two. “But I

forget.” She squeezed water from a work-shirt.

“Anyway, foreman like her,” said Shoji One. She threw a pair of wet dungarees

over the line. I passed her a clothes-pin.

“Cause she hard worker,” said Mrs. Okada.

40

“Like three men,” said Shoji One. The dungarees danced a jig in the wind.

“Food good now,” said Mrs. Okada, as if that was the final word. She hoisted her

laundry basket on her hip and walked away, straw sandals slapping the bottoms of her

feet.

Shoji-one turned to her sister-in-law. “Remember that tea? Real gold around the

cup.” She pressed her plump hands together and looked to the sky. “Such ocha. Green

like jade”

“How come we don’t wake up in morning?” said Shoji-two. “I never sleep over-

time in all my life.”

No one knew how the new cook had found her way to our wilderness, but everything got

better. Less fighting, not so many accidents, better production: work contracts renewed.

Only my father didn’t improve. Every day he worked in the woods and every night he

drank behind the bunkhouse. Mr. Okada warned him he wouldn’t protect his job if he

didn’t stop, and my father promised. And promised.

But Sho-ichi was right. Madam Murasaki did the work of three men. Cooked,

cleaned, chopped wood, shot grouse and rabbit with her 22-gauge pump shotgun, fished

the streams for trout and salmon, knew the secret places of forest mushrooms. She dried

cascara bark from the white buckthorn and sold the powder in town as a laxative. With

the money, she bought us books and supplies for school in town, sometimes clothes and

shoes. I attended school regularly and to got good grades. My hakujin classmates asked

for help with arithmetic and geography and composition. I never refused, but even

though I stopped fighting, I never made friends. Every day I waited for the school bell to

free me of shoes and skirts and hard desks. Every day I ran to Log City and Madam

Murasaki’s stories. At night, I waited for my father to be carried home.

“Sit.” Madam Murasaki pointed to a clearing. She sat on the end of a wooden crate, tiny

feet dangling, her voice growing strange and dusky. Kata-kata-kata-kata—she hit two

41

wooden planks together. Kobo, Jefferson, Lincoln, and I leaned forward, eyes large in

our heads.

ONCE, in old Japan, a woodcutter and his wife lived in a hut at the edge of a

forest next to a cold, clear stream. Every day the old man went into the woods and every

day the old woman did the wash in the stream.

One day, as she scrubbed the clothes against a rock on the shore, a large ball

came bouncing in the current. When the old woman hiked up her skirt and waded into

the stream, she saw that the ball was really a giant peach. What a fine thing for her

husband’s supper, she thought and at that very moment, the peach leapt into her hands,

round and golden as a small sun.

That evening, the old woman presented the peach to her husband. As soon as he

slid his knife into its soft contours, the aroma of nectar and blossoms filled the hut. The

peach split in perfect halves like a book that opens to the middle of a story. In the center

of the peach,instead of the pit, stood a buoyant, baby boy, who lifted his chubby arms and

called: “Okasan! Otosan!” Mother. Father.

The couple’s happiness was complete. They named the child Momotaro, which

means Peach Boy, and he brought them great joy, for they raised him to be gentle and

kind and honorable. He grew to be so strong he did the work of ten men, so patient the

birds and animals of the forest flocked to him, so deft he could snatch flies from the air

with his chopsticks, so clever he outwitted the politicians who tried to cheat the peasants

out of their land.

Madam Murasaki told us how Momotaro sailed to Ogre Island and fought the

demons with the help of a wolf, a monkey and a pheasant and brought honor to his parents

for the rest of their lives. But best of all were the quiet parts, where we find the old couple

in their hut by the woods. I liked their kindness and contentment and their simple life

together. Best of all, I liked the happy ending, which to me was not the defeat of the

demons, but that the old people and the little boy had found each other. Lincoln and

Jefferson thrilled to Madam Murasaki’s tales of samurai warriors. Kobo collapsed in

helpless laughter when she imitated the golden chicken squawking in distress. He froze in

suspense when she beat her drum to the giant’s footsteps, and cheered as Junzo the Giant

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Killer escaped down the bamboo shoot. But the story of Peach Boy was always my

favorite. Sometimes I even imagined that Momotaro was a girl.

So that’s the story Madam Murasaki told me when I was a child at the gate of

womanhood. And the beginning of my own story of how I came to be Momoko, Peach

Girl.

I was twelve when my father’s body was brought to camp in a horse-drawn wagon. A

log had rolled in the millstream and pinned him under. Only his caulked boots stuck out

of the tarp that covered him, one foot twisted at an impossible angle.

“Stop the child,” someone shouted, but I scrambled onto the wagon.

I tore off the tarp and looked into my father’s silent face. Oh, I thought, he’s only

asleep. But why so waxy, so blue, his mouth stretched into a grin? His hair was alive,

though, the lock across his forehead wet and vibrant. The water, too, was alive. It dripped

off his fingers, collected in his clothes, pooled around his body. Only my Pa was still.

“Just a matter of time.” A voice tunneled up from the ground. “He was already a

dead man. The booze . . .”

I flew off the wagon, flailing toward the sound.

“Kichigai!” “She’s crazy.”

“Sono! Stop, child!”

“She-devil! Get her off me!”

I tore at a shoulder, a sleeve, a pant leg. They pried my fingers apart, pulled and

dragged me away, kicking, scratching, screaming until my screams turned soundless.

Mrs. Okada locked me in her plump arms, my cries muffled in the pillows of her bosom.

“Get out of here!” someone shouted, and the driver snapped the reins.

I ran, clinging to the sides—slipped, dragged, fell—choking, coughing, spitting

pebbles and dirt—got up—ran, stumbled, ran—legs like lead, lungs bursting—all the

while the driver, the horse, the wagon, pulling away and away—my father disappearing

over a hill, in a cloud of dust, a puff of smoke.

43

Mrs. Okada and the two Shojis advanced toward me—three plump hens, bosoms

bobbing, sandal backs flapping. I crashed through the woods, running—from what,

towards what, I didn’t know—only that my heart felt like it would rip out of my chest.

“Sono, Sono . . . come back. Sooo-no.”

My mother’s name. No, mine. Named after a woman who hadn’t wanted me, a

woman my father had wanted too much.

They brought me back. Mrs. Okada washed my wounds. Sho-ichi altered her

dresses and clothed me—one of hers made two for me.

Time passed. A day, five days, two weeks. Our cabin went to my father’s

replacement, a rotund, clumsy man who couldn’t dance on logs. His wife watched, bony

arms folded, while I gathered my father’s belongings. Mrs. Okada took me in, but

Lincoln and Jefferson, afraid of my rages and sudden silences, avoided me.

Madam Murasaki was gone, as suddenly as if she never existed. I had shut her

from my mind, made her disappear. One less person to tell me lies, to ply me with

useless stories and false hopes.

The voices swirled:

“Brought up a wild thing.”

No! I was Pa’s helper.

“She used to be a good child.”

I was very useful!

“Demons have possessed her.”

“No wonder. She has her mother’s blood. Her father’s weakness.”

No! I’m the best of them, he told me so!

“We took her in, poor thing.”

“She keeps running away. What can we do, we must work.”

“We fear for our own children.”

“There’s only so much one can do, life is hard.”

“Shikataganai.” It can’t be helped.

I ran to the woods with Curly the Chow, one of the camp dogs. For eleven days

and nights we slept on cedar boughs and wandered the streams. We knew the secret

44

places of mushrooms, the thickest blueberry patches, the best wild onion and eating stalk.

We caught salmon, Curly leaping into the stream and coming up with a fat one between

his jaws, I standing waist high in the water, scooping my wiggling, wild-eyed catch in the

folds of my Shoji-altered dress.

On the third day, we came to a streambed thick with spawning salmon. We

stepped from one silvery back to another as if they were river rocks—the way my father

had leapt and birled over logs. Madam Murasaki’s stories began to come alive in me. I

became Momoko, Peach Girl—on a mission to Ogre Island to defeat the demons, my

faithful wolf Curly by my side.

On my fifth night in the woods, I dreamt that a giant bird hovered over me. When

I looked up at the sky, I realized that it was not a bird but a giant kimono, black and

crimson, glittering with gold-and-silver threads. Its sleeves were enormous and made a

swooping sound as it fluttered toward me, darkening the ground. I ran through the

woods, crashing through branches and brambles, screaming until I woke.

Curly whimpered beside me, and I buried my face in his thick, orange coat. A

rice ball, still warm, a bright pickled plum at its center, sat on a large chrysanthemum

leaf. I gobbled it unquestioningly. Curly’s black tongue licked my fingers clean.

The next night, I found a seaweed-wrapped mound of grilled river eel; the next, a

steaming bowl of miso soup in a celadon green bowl.

On the eleventh night, I made my way to the mess-tent and found a teriyaki

chicken leg, covered with a square of silk furoshiki. A candle flickered in the center of

the table. “Madam Murasaki?” I called. But the night was still. I sat and ate the chicken

leg and tossed the bone to Curly. “Onegai shimasu,” I whispered. Thank you. I knew

she was near.

“Come on, boy,” I said, leaving the tent. I tugged at his arched tail, but he didn’t

follow. “Curly,” I whispered, “come,” but he panted a wide smile and stayed.

I woke in the woods to the sharp smell of hemlock and the sound of a varied

thrush. Light filtered through the trees. I had dreamt that I carried my father’s lunch

bucket to him, leaping across logs to the middle of the river. But he was on another log

and floated away. “Pa, your bento!” I shouted, and he waved. “Papa’s little helper,” he

45

called, beaming. I felt something warm and sticky under me and rose to see blood on my

underclothes, lining my thighs. I had become a woman. I was thirteen years old.

I washed the checkered blue-and-white dress Sho-ichi had made for me and laid

it, torn and wrinkled, on a rock to dry. Monarchs flitted over my head and the silvery

backs of salmon glinted in the sun.

I walked along the forest path that I had crashed through so blindly eleven days

earlier and returned to the segregated camp I had called home. I knocked at Mrs.

Okada’s door. When she appeared, I knelt, forehead to the ground, and begged her

pardon for the trouble I had been.

“Thank you for caring,” I said. “I will always be grateful.” I had practiced on,

my debt of respect and gratitude.

Curly greeted me when I entered the mess-tent, where a Chinese man was gutting

chickens.

“Where is Madam Murasaki?” I asked.

“She go,” he said. “Ten, eleven day.” But the rice ball, I thought. The steaming

miso soup.

“Are you the new cook?”

“Ya,” he grinned. Curly whimpered, and the new cook tossed him a gizzard.

I answered the advertisement in the Puyallup Sentinel for a girl to keep house for a retired

school teacher and his wife.

Dear Mr. And Mrs. Charles, I am Japanese. I am fourteen years old and an orphan. I can cook and clean and mend clothes. I don’t take up much room. For the first time, I signed my name “Momo.” On the day I left Log City, I found a bronze funeral urn on the doorstep of the

Okadas’ cabin. Tied to the urn was a prayer banner on which my father’s name was

written. I put the urn and the prayer banner in the duffle bag my father had brought with

him when he left his village. Now I had his ashes. And my father’s letters to my mother

46

that she had left behind—foolish, deceitful letters she had never forgiven him for writing.

I had little of my own to pack. I had outgrown the clothes that Kobo Shoji’s mother had

altered for me. At fourteen, I was taller than my father had been. New breasts pushed

out from under Mr. Okada’s hand-me-down work-shirt.

I had made my farewells and was alone. Lincoln and Jefferson were in school,

the men working, Mrs. Okada book-keeping in the company office. My eyelids grew

heavy and I lay on the cot. The day was overcast, the cabin dark and chilly. I huddled

under a blanket and slept.

I saw it as soon as I opened my eyes, the golden object, a tiny sphere from the

sun. It glowed in the room—a peach—I knew it instantly, though it was the first that I

had ever seen.

“Madam Murasaki?” I called. But I was alone. A slit of daylight shone between

the door that was slowly closing.

The day had brightened. I walked to the road to meet the couple, Mr. and Mrs.

Charles, who would take me to the town of Puyallup. I put down my father’s duffle and

sat on the grass. I held the peach and stroked its soft down. I sank my teeth into a side

that was slightly flattened and soft.

I will never forget that first explosion of sweetness in my mouth, or the

overwhelming fragrance and trickle of juice down my chin—clear and cool, a nectar, a

balm. I heard insects in the tall grass beside the road and the blades of grass rubbing

together in the breeze. Soon, I was standing in a forest of grass blades, and looking up at

the sweet mounds of clover blossoms. Made small like the baby Momotaro, I was being

sucked into the center of the peach, where in the concave space of its heart lay a pool of

clear, cool liquid.

Swimming in the nectar was a tiny Madam Murasaki. She was no longer old, but

looked as she sometimes had in repose, her face tender and bride-like, a blush across the

high mound of her cheeks.

“Come,” she said, and I entered the pool, skirts tucked in my waistband, as easily as

I had entered the stream with Curly the Chow.

47

We swam together side by side. Sleek as seals, we dove into the thick and aromatic

liquid; we floated on our backs, eyes closed, our hair streaming behind us. On the bank

lay a black cloak.

I wanted to stay in the peach crater forever, but Madam Murasaki said it was time

to go and she swam me to shore. I climbed out from the heart of the peach, and she dried

me in the cloak. She combed and braided my hair and pinned the braids on top of my

head with combs made of abalone shells.

“There,” she said. “A crown for your head. Like a princess.”

And that is how Mr. and Mrs. Charles found me, waiting on the side of the road,

my skin fragrant with nectar, a black-hooded cloak draped across my shoulders. That

happened in 1924 when, licking peach juice from my fingers, I sat by the side of a

country road, waiting for my future.

Momo-san ended her story at the side of the road. When we asked, “Then what?” she

always said, “That’s another story.” She never told us that story.

I am old now, and young people come to me from the schools and universities.

They tell me there’s a new kind of history, and they want to hear my talk-stories. They

are very young and very earnest and ask me questions and write down everything I say.

Sometimes they give me a microphone or tell me to look into the camera.

In the 1980s, I gave testimony to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and

Internment of Civilians. It was in my old high school building, which is now a

community center. They were held all over the country. Later, our words were carried to

the United States Congress. Imagine!

What is history? the young people ask. What is truth, what is fiction? Is the truth

stranger than fiction? These things are for others, with their grants and degrees, to

answer. I know only that we have our stories. What can we do but share them?

48

SHIRLEY TEMPLE DREAMS

I. The Next Best Thing

Late in life, my mother Yuki talked about the kindness of strangers. I remember, when I

was an adolescent, her crying for poor Blanche DuBois and her lost Belle Rive. It was as if

one fictional Southern white woman and the loss of her family plantation made her kin to

Mama and her own ruined family in southern Japan. In her wildest conjuring, she and

Blanche were suffering sisters. So alone in themselves that the kindness of a stranger

extending his arm was an act of grace.

Gone with the Wind was the first movie I remember seeing outside of camp, and I

was too young to know whether Mama wept for Scarlett O’Hara. It was the last summer of

the war and we’d arrived in Queens to live with my former baby-sitter and her husband, the

four of us crowded into a two-room walk-up across from the elevated tracks. My father

was still in prison camp. I was nine.

She must have seen parallels between Ashley Wilkes and my gentle, soft-spoken

dad and his own lost Japan. She must have longed for a roguish Rhett Butler to run up the

rickety back stairs of our tenement and sweep her off her feet, in front of neighbors sitting

on porches with their bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, in front of passengers on the IRT that

rumbled past, their faces pressed to the glass, bodies dangling from overhead straps.

But all I remember about Gone with the Wind the first time was that it was long and

boring, with stretches of talking and talking, and that I’d drift off, to be startled awake by

shouting or shooting or Butterfly McQueen screaming, Miss Scarlett! Miss Scarlett! We

sat through two showings.

It was dark when we walked out of the Strand Theatre. Heat still clung to the

pavement. We climbed the back stairs, our blouses sticking to our backs, aromas wafting

49

from the kitchens of Italian families. On the fifth floor landing, the sour-salty smells of

pickled radishes and soy sauce overtook the scent of garlic and basil and marinara.

It wasn’t until years later, when I saw Gone with the Wind again in a cracker-box of

a theater on the boardwalk of Venice, California, that I tied the vixenish, young Scarlett to

the fragile and ravaged Blanche of Vivian Leigh’s later years and to the memory of Mama

sobbing in the dark of the Strand.

She had, of course, no sympathy for Amanda Wingfield, another faded Southern

belle of Tennessee Williams’ life and imagination. Amanda was too much a comic,

complex monster for my mother to take. She gravitated toward the heroic and the operatic,

the dying courtesan of Camille or the self-sacrificing mother in Stella Dallas, not a drab,

delusional chatterbox living in a tenement across the street from a shoe factory in St. Louis.

When we left the movie of The Glass Menagerie—I must have been fourteen or fifteen—

she gripped her purse tightly under her arm and strode across the lobby, flushed but head

held high, as if warding off a swarm of reporters with their flash bulbs and accusations.

My mother believed in movies and in their larger-than life characters. She wept

when James Dean was killed in his sports car on a country road in California; she saw in

the misunderstood youths of Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden the son she never

had. A son who yearned to measure up in the unforgiving eyes of his father. A boy who

for one night created a family, becoming husband to a misunderstood girl, father to an

outcast boy. My mother believed in, identified with, these desperate people. They were

glorious illusions, giant figures on a silver screen reaching into the dark, worming their

way into the lives of the poor, the downtrodden, the huddled masses of America’s promise.

Shadow and substance.

The real people in my mother’s life were never quite enough, not brave or beautiful

or large enough, not articulate enough or glorious enough to meet her needs. Not my

father, not I. Only the ghosts of her past could fill her—a beautiful mother who abandoned

her, an idealized younger brother who died at twenty-one, an adored grandfather who killed

himself with a two-hundred-year-old sword. By the time my father and I came along, we

were too little, too late. Although I tried for all my early life to be what she wanted, I never

knew how. I tried to be Scarlett, but desisted before I turned into Blanche. I tried to be

50

Shirley Temple, but then she grew up and it became ludicrous to go on singing “On the

Good Ship Lollipop” into old age, as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? proved. Or

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

Mama continued to bruise and challenge me, but by the end of her life I was living

mine. By then, I did not mind being her next best thing. Like the boy in Rebel Without a

Cause, I found my own family; like the young man in East of Eden who forgave his father,

I returned to my mother late in our lives and found forgiveness in the act of forgiving.

Even Shirley Temple left the silver screen to be a real human being.

1935: Yuki

On the day she learned she was with child, Yuki ordered a Checkered Cab to take her

directly from the doctor’s office to Frederick & Nelson. When the stupid man couldn’t

grasp “take me Fuled-ik—go Fuled-ik Nelu-son,” she scribbled the name in eyebrow pencil

on the back of the doctor’s prescription for prenatal vitamins. All the same, she gave the

driver a large tip to show him . . . just to show him.

The Checkered Cab stopped at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pine. A white-gloved

hand opened the taxi door and ushered her onto the emerald green carpet that stretched

from curb to glass-paneled door. Inside, crystal chandeliers dipped from vaulted ceilings,

and clear glass counters gleamed row after innumerable row. Slender girls in crisp white

blouses and tailored green jackets stood in front of banks of elevators, their white-gloved

hands crossed primly in front of green, A-line skirts.

Yuki’s heels clicked efficiently along the white marble floor, then glided across the

signature green carpet to the middle of the store. She felt like Cinderella entering the

palace of her future, except it wasn’t a fairy tale she’d stepped into but high-tone America.

Gaman, perseverance. Giri, strength. She squeezed her alligator clutch under her

arm and rose on the tips of her alligator pumps. Stretching to her fullest four-feet-eleven-

inches, she gripped the counter with her beige kid gloves and leaned up at the woman

behind it. Speak slowly, e-nunciate, she’d learned in night school. Look people in the eye.

51

It’s not rude in America. She had practiced the words, the look, in her dresser mirror.

Lower your voice. Don’t be shrill. It betrays weakness. She was shouting now, straining

the cords of her neck into blue-tinted ropes.

Shulee Temporu, she repeated through gritted teeth: Puleeze, where Shulee Tempu?

Inside the echo chamber of her head, the words grew louder, shriller.

She wanted to be smiled at, really smiled at—not the perfunctory split lips but a

smile that spread from the eyes. She wanted to be called “Madam” as the saleswoman

had addressed the customer before, a dumpling of a woman in a red-and-yellow plaid suit

and a straw hat that looked like a pancake. May I be of assistance, Madam? Would

Madam like . . .

The saleswoman, neither young nor old, but fine-featured and perfectly coiffed,

looked in Yuki’s direction, not at her. To look is to humble yourself to interest, curiosity,

even favor. No recognition sparked the grey-green eyes; no mark of kindness marred the

alabaster face.

Giri. Yuki pulled off a glove and placed it on the counter, careful not to smudge the

glass. She unsnapped the alligator claw that clasped her purse and unzipped every

compartment and side pocket. She felt the sticky crunch of peppermint candy wrappers, a

lace handkerchief, the cool metal of a box of Sen-Sens. In the center of her purse, she

palmed her billfold, her tortoise shell compact, the satin clutch that held her makeup.

Perspiration glistened over her upper lip. Her nose was beginning to run. She couldn’t

remember in which of the system of compartments and pockets she’d found her

handkerchief. She didn’t dare look for it.

Gaman. Head lowered, chin tucked into her fox fur, she pressed on. She knew the

veil that hung from the broad brim of her hat shadowed her fluttering lids, her clenched

jaw. Still, she felt dozens of mocking eyes, smiling smirks—Seattle or Kumamoto, they

were universal. Older girls in school uniforms, swarming like dark crows over the

playground—her aunt, a rice merchant’s daughter scrutinizing her with rat’s eyes even as

words of welcome gushed from her mouth. Orphan brat of my husband’s sister. Another

mouth to feed. Where’s your high and mighty family now, eh?

52

Nouveau riche her grandfather had spat, and retired to his music room to slit open

his belly. His eldest son, left with only the family name to trade on, married the rich

merchant’s daughter. Twelve-year-old Yuki was left without grandfather, without

mother—ten years later without her fiercely loved and hated younger brother. She never

knew her father’s name.

Cousins, servants, neighbors, shopkeepers, teachers. Mocking eyes, rough hands.

She grew invisible—Yuki the Orphan Mouse—but gigantic inside. We are born alone and

die alone, her grandfather’s words, his belief. But what of life? She was carrying new

life now. She would make her world anew.

The saleswoman towered over her. The elevator girls stood at their stations. The

floor walker strode the aisles, the sharp, clean scent of a dyed green carnation wafting from

his lapel. Yuki took her hand out of her purse and snapped the alligator claw in place.

Loose tobacco had wedged under her nails and she flushed with shame and anger.

The saleswoman opened a drawer, removed a leather shammy, and wiped lazy

circles across the glass. Yuki felt the flush of indignation and, with it, a strange dignity.

She snatched her glove from the counter as if rescuing it from contagion. Something, the

surprise and intensity of the gesture—or was it the heat that changed the molecules in the

air?—drew the woman’s attention. She regarded the small woman in the veil-trimmed hat,

twin fox heads dangling from one shoulder of her soft brown suit. The customer held up a

glove made of fine, tanned leather.

Yuki stared into the countertop as if it was a reflecting pool. Dark irises and a grim

mouth. No sign of the conflagration within her, no ravaged flesh, no leering death’s head,

only the perpetual frown, the lined forehead. Under the powdered face, plucked and

penciled brows, and kewpie doll lips was the smooth face of a child. A serious child, a

child without mirth, masquerading as an adult.

She felt it as soon as she slid her hand into her jacket pocket. The advertisement

that she had ransacked her purse for, had writhed with humiliation and anger for, resting

snugly against the satin lining.

53

She unfolded the page of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, smoothed out the creases,

spread it across the counter, and turned the ad toward the saleswoman. She did not break

the silence.

FREDERICK & NELSON AND ITS PARENT COMPANY, MARSHALL

FIELD & COMPANY, ANNOUNCES A SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION OF A

LIFE-LIKE SHIRLEY TEMPLE DOLL. STANDING AT 36-INCHES, THIS

MASTERLY CRAFTED RENDITION OF AMERICA’S SWEETHEART IS

THE NEXT BEST THING TO HAVING THE REAL SHIRLEY IN YOUR

OWN HOME.

The saleswoman leaned toward the paper, her fingers splayed across its corners,

her lips slowly moving. Yuki noticed a chip in the woman’s polish, “Fatal Plum,” the

same shade she had carefully spread across her own nails the night before. She was calm

now and pitied this white woman who read by moving her lips. She looked down at her

naked hand and regarded her own immaculately manicured nails.

“You’ll want the Toy Department, Madam,” the saleswoman said, and gestured

toward the elevators.

She had been noticed, addressed. Triumphed.

The doll came first, delivered in May, wrapped in the wardrobe of spring. Pink organza

dress, white anklets trimmed with pink cuffs, white patent-leather Mary Janes. With it a

glass case, to be assembled. Yuki spent the months of her maternity selecting Vogue

patterns for a winter wardrobe, shopping for rabbit fur trim and periwinkle blue velvet in

Frederick & Nelson’s fabric department. Her husband Tomio, who worked as a

bookkeeper on the tenth floor, took her to lunch in the Tea Room.

He’s the only Japanese (except the Kashimas, but they’re janitors, they come when

the store is closed). My husband works on the top floor, in the office, in the daytime, with

the hakujin. He is educated, from a high-class family. Before coming to America, he

studied two years at Imperial University. “Honest as the day is long and never any

trouble,” says the boss Mr. Wilson. “We couldn’t get along without our Tommy.”

Americans give you nicknames when they like you. They would call him down to help

54

customers from Japan. A man from the Embassy always asked for him, and there were

those three sumo wrestlers that came to wrestle at the Puyallup State Fair. Everybody

likes him, hakujin and Japanese both. His family is samurai. His father a judge. Two

brothers in the Imperial Navy. Educated. Old family. High class, yes.

The child arrived seven months later: December 7, 1935. Shirley Temple

Sachiko Omori. Legitimate. United States citizen. Mother, Yukiko, 32, and father,

Tomio, 47, registered resident aliens.

The room is so full of flowers the nurses can hardly move around. More flowers

than the white woman in the other bed. Cards and telegrams too. My bed piled high with

presents. I am in the same hospital as the mayor’s wife who is having her gall bladder

removed. My baby doctor is famous; he writes books. His office is downtown. Best of

the best.

It’s a girl. I knew it would be a girl. It had to be.

As long as Sachi could remember, the Shirley Temple doll stood on a pedestal in the dining

room, staring out of its glass case—blonde head tilted, famous dimples curled in

parentheses around parted lips, chubby hand lifted in a greeting both royal and friendly.

Like the Statute of Liberty, she beamed the promise, “You too can belong.” Enough dance

and music classes, enough charm school and elocution lessons, and your daughters too can

shine in the firmament of American dreams.

Tiered on high shelves, the Japanese dolls looked out from their glass cases,

adamantine eyes glowing from chalk-white faces. Every year Yuki’s collection grew: for

Girl’s Day in March, Bon Odori, Festival of the Dead, in August, Sachi’s birthday in

December. A standing order with the Japan Trading Company. On the opposite wall

stretched Tomio’s golf trophies. Loving cups, wooden plaques, gold-plated figurines

teeing off thick pedestals. A nephrite jade ashtray in the shape of a golf course.

1935 is the best year so far. Graduation from night school. Birth of a daughter.

Tomio’s trophy for Japanese-American Golfer of the Year. Our eighth anniversary.

55

1941: Sachi

December 6

I love Saturdays because Mama puts up my hair and pins butterflies or tassels or paper

blossoms in it and Daddy makes French toast with syrup for breakfast. I love riding the

streetcar to Japan Town with my babysitter Midori, climbing the noisy wooden stairs to

Japanese dance class, and sliding down the banister on the way back.

In our white and pink kimonos, wide obi sashes, and stiff white socks split at the

toe, we try to follow Madam Nakatani’s every move. I love the sad notes of the Japanese

flute and koto, our slow, precise movements, and the way we tilt our heads, direct our eyes,

and put our hands just so. I love the tinkle of hair ornaments in my ears and the way my

kimono sleeves hang straight down in panels. I love learning how to pull my fan part way,

then snapping it wide open with a flick of my wrist. I love the sharp sound it makes, like

the cracking of a whip. I’m sorry Madam Nakatani won’t let Mama come to class

anymore.

But Mama teaches me at home—how to snap the fan, how to walk pigeon-toed for

odori—Japanese dance—and how to turn my feet out for ballet. She tells me about the

Spanish dancer, La Argentinita, who beats her heels into the floor faster than a machine

gun spitting bullets. She tells me about the new movie star, Rita Hayworth, who comes

from a family of Spanish dancers. In Blood and Sand, Rita Hayworth throws a rose to the

matador, who dedicates the bull to her, and all the while her boyfriend is watching, jealous.

Mama shows me in the living room how Tyrone Power twirls his cape in the movie, and I

play the bull, holding two forks over my head and charging and charging at Mama until I’m

worn out and sweaty, and we laugh and laugh.

Mama says she likes the kind of woman that men ruin themselves over. Carmen is

one like that. Daddy’s boss gave him tickets to Madam Butterfly when he and his wife

went on vacation, but Mama really wanted to see Carmen. Madam Butterfly is Daddy’s

favorite opera, but Mama says Chio-chio-san is too namby-pamby. Of course, the bad

ladies have to pay in the end, so don’t be like them, she tells me. They’re more interesting

but most of the time they die young or turn into prostitutes. Mama liked them anyway

because she said they had giri and were shibui. Deep.

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Shirley Temple movies are Mama’s favorites. After she saw Bright Eyes at the

Wintergarden downtown, she taught me “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Shuffle step, shuffle

step, shuffle step ball change. She tells me that I will be a star.

Daddy put the extra leaf in the dining room table and Mama took the linen tablecloth out of

the hope chest. She flung it over the table like a matador with his cape. It smelled of cedar

and rose petals and floated through the air. It glided evenly over the tabletop when it

landed.

Mama rehearsed the dinner over and over in her mind. The weather will be good,

she told Midori and me, no one will be late, and everyone will ooh and aah at the parade of

dishes coming out the swinging door. Don’t rush, Midori. Look cheerful. Be careful not

to spill. Shrimp cocktail and deviled eggs, octopus marinated in miso, king crab with

mussels, Japanese eggplant, salmon teriyaki, and sushi looking like pinwheels on the blue-

and-white Imari plate. Daddy will carry out the rock cod on the heavy white platter. The

eyeballs look like marbles, the back is silvery and decorated with red ginger, ruffled green

onions, and water chestnuts carved into chrysanthemums.

Daddy was leaving to pick up my birthday cake because the bakery is closed on

Sundays. I had wanted a tea party with my kindergarten friends, but Mama didn’t want all

those sticky fingers on the furniture. She promised to invite them in the summer.

“When nice outside.”

“Promise, Mama?” But the kitchen door had already swung shut and Daddy was

standing on one leg against the back door, stretching a rubber galosh over his shoe.

It was drizzling. The temperature’s dipping, Daddy said, and Mama returned to the

kitchen and said she’s worried about tomorrow’s forecast. Snow melting from coats.

Tracks on the carpet. Some people might not even take off their shoes. Dirty American

habit.

When Daddy brought the cake home, we gathered around the big pink box. I was

weak with excitement.

“Oh, boy!” Midori said.

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Chocolate with butter-cream frosting. Double-layered. A spun-sugar Shirley

Temple in the center. Shiny green vines curlicuing around the big “6.” A rainbow of

letters: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHULEE.”

“A-raaa!” said Mama. Shulee? I never said Shulee! Stupid stupid man! Take it

back! Make that Swedish idiot fix it!

Daddy closed the lid. Calm down . . . Mr. Nielsen wrote it the way Mama said it . .

. how would he know I’m named after Shirley Temple? My stomach began to gnarl.

Daddy took Life Magazine off the kitchen table. I followed him into the living

room.

“It’s a real pretty cake,” Midori said, putting on her coat.

Stupid foreigner, Mama shouted.

Mr. Nielsen’s Norwegian, said Papa, opening Life.

“See you tomorrow!” Midori said.

December 7

“No move,” Mama said. She twirled my hair around the curling iron. I tried to mind. I

knew she was still mad about the cake. But I must have moved after all, because suddenly

she was yelping and slapping. When she yanked the cord out of the wall, it whipped

around like an angry snake.

Daddy once said that Mama’s temper was like a big tsunami wave that boils out of

the Inland Sea, and it was like that this time. I sat still and small, hoping Mama’s tsunami

would go away. But she was pulling me by my arm—like a Raggedy Ann doll or daikon

radish—and I was pushed through the swinging door into the dining room—looking at my

better self, my face pressed to the case, my breath making a circle on the glass while the

other Shirley stared back at me with her dead, smiling eyes.

Then my father, fuzzy with sleep, was padding into the dining room in his bathrobe

and brown slippers, and I was standing in the corner to think things over, after which I was

sure to be a better girl. He put his hands on my shoulders and I whirled around and hugged

his legs, and he sat me on his lap at the dining room table and ran his hand through my hair,

part bouncy curls, part stubbornly itself. Then he said, “Chotto,” just a minute, and we

58

walked into the kitchen where Mama sat at the kitchen table, the curling iron still in her fist

and the cord dangling to the floor. And he cupped one hand on the back of her neck and

put his mouth near her ear and said, She’s only a child. It’s her birthday and she’s excited.

Her body relaxed and she inclined her head toward his. I stood, shivering in my

nightgown, smelling soy sauce and burnt hair.

Midori plunked down on the back steps and unbuckled her skates. She lived around the

block behind the Japanese Methodist Church, where her father took care of the yard and

her mother and three sisters kept house for Reverend Adams and Reverend Koyano, the

assistant pastor. Her five brothers had grown up and moved away; two of them had gone

back to Japan. Mama said the Takahashis bred like rabbits, but she liked Midori and never

yelled at her. She was sixteen and in high school, and she took care of me when I made

Mama nervous. Her brown eyes bulged out of her pimply moon face and her teeth stuck

out like Bugs Bunny. She was the most beautiful ugly person I ever knew.

Mama came downstairs and asked Midori to zip up her new red silk dress.

“Gee, Mrs. Omori, you look just like a movie star,” said Midori.

“You sink so?” Mama laughed her Greta Garbo laugh.

The doorbell rang. “Company’s here!” shouted Midori, and opened the door to

Mrs. Koyano and her daughter Eleanor.

“Where’s Dougie?” I asked.

“With Dad,” said Eleanor. Her hair was in a perfect page boy, and she wore her

fluffy sea-foam green sweater and her blue-and-green plaid skirt with a hundred pleats. A

copper penny shone bright in each loafer. She rolled her eyes and said Dougie was having

one of his tantrums.

Mrs. Koyano had brought orange Jello-O with fruit cocktail for the party. “You put

right away ice-box, Midori.” I knew Mama hated jello.

When Mrs. Koyano saw Mama she said, “You wear that dress to church, Yukiko?”

The sides of her mouth drooped and her eyes slid into slits. “So bu-right.”

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Mama’s cheeks were puffing up and my stomach was beginning to knot, but

suddenly there were toots from a car horn and Archie Noguchi was driving on top of our

lawn.

“Gosh!” said Midori, as we ran to the window. “Grace just smacked her head on

the windshield.”

Archie bounded out of the car and strode up the walk. Grace got out from the

passenger’s side, holding her forehead.

At the door, Mama bowed Japanese style, but Archie walked right past. “Tomio!”

he shouted. Mama started to shut the door on Grace. “Gomen na sai”—excuse me—Grace

said. Oh, I didn’t even see you, Mama said.

“Happy birthday, Sachi . . . I mean Shirley.” Grace handed me a box decorated

with paper roses. Inside were squares of gold and silver paper and an origami book. Grace

was the only one so far to say happy birthday to me.

The doorbell rang again, and I knew it was Reverend Koyano and Dougie.

“I’m four!” said Dougie, and held up his John Deere tractor. He’d been saying “I’m

four!” ever since his birthday in November. Whenever his parents called him, it sounded

like “Doggie.”

Daddy poured coffee. Midori brought Dougie a glass of milk. Daddy switched on

the Philco and tuned to his opera program.

Un bel di, vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo . . .

“Hey, Tomio. You some high-tone guy,” said Archie, and began to yodel to

Madam Butterfly. Daddy laughed and turned the dial. When “In the Mood” came on,

Archie grabbed Eleanor’s hand.

“Cut a rug, Eleanor!”

Archie began swiveling his hips and twirling Eleanor under his arm. When he

knocked against the coffee table, Dougie’s glass of milk somersaulted to the floor. Grace

jumped up and started patting napkins on the floor. Mama, who was coming down the

stairs in a high-necked navy blue dress, ran to the kitchen for a dishtowel. She dropped to

her knees and rubbed the spot with Ivory soap. Archie kept spinning Eleanor under his

arm.

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“I’m so sorry, Yuki-san,” said Grace, but Mama kept her angry eyes on the Oriental

carpet.

Mrs. Koyano leaned toward her husband and whispered that Mama looked like she

was praying. To furniture god, don’t you think? It was hard to tell when Mrs. Koyano was

smiling; only the skin around her lips cracked a little.

“Sshh,” said Reverend Koyano, and turned around to watch Eleanor twirl. After a

while, he looked at his watch and stood.

Mrs. Koyano got up too. “Go-to-church time, El-nor,” she shouted over “In the

Mood.” “Doggie!”

The music stopped so suddenly Mrs. Koyano was yelling into empty air. “We

interrupt this program.” Something about “bombing.” Daddy turned up the sound and

Archie and Reverend Koyano moved close to the Philco. When the words “Empire of

Japan” came out, everyone was quiet.

Then Mama asked, “Wat is Paru Haba?”

“Philippines,” said Archie.

“Didn’t the announcer say Honolulu?” said Grace. Her voice was as light as a

child’s.

“Hawaii, so what?” Archie glared at Grace.

“Maa,” said Daddy. “Nihon to Amerika ka?” Japan and America, is it?

“Maa,” said Reverend Koyano.

I wondered when we were going to cut my cake.

The telephone rang all day. Daddy stayed home from church. So did Midori and Dougie

and I. Don’t know, Daddy said, talking low into the phone. No, not sure. He listened a

long time, walking back and forth, carrying the telephone. Shikataganai, he finally said.

Shikataganai. It can’t be helped.

Mama returned from church and told us Reverend Koyano said God bless America,

from the pulpit. Eleanor ran in to get Dougie, and we waved out the door at the Koyanos

waiting in the car, and that was the last time I ever saw Reverend Koyano.

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Archie called from the men’s hotel in Japan Town where his father lived. Mr.

Hashimoto, the Fuller Brush man, called too. He was worried about his wife in Nagasaki

who was visiting relatives.

“Shall we eat? Shall we cut my birthday cake?” I asked, but Midori said, “Ssh,

your mom and I are going to make some lunch.”

Daddy kept answering the telephone. What can I tell them? he said to Mama. I

don’t know what’s going to happen any more than they do. He stared into the receiver.

You’re a good person to talk to, Mama said. Everybody trusts you.

He walked to the hall closet.

What are you doing? He took out his golf bag. Where are you going? He zipped

up his leather jacket and put his cap on his head. Don’t go out now. It’ll be dark soon—it’s

not safe. Answer me.

Jefferson links, Daddy said. Calm my nerves.

“Tomio!” Mama screamed when Daddy shut the door. Then she called Midori over

and her words tumbled out.

Midori’s round eyes never left Mama’s face. “Hai,” she nodded. “Hai.”

Mama put on her coat with the fur collar and the floppy hat that made her look like

Joan Crawford. She was in such a hurry she slammed the door.

The telephone rang. Midori told her father the party had busted up. He said she

should come home.

“Can’t,” she said. “I’m supposed to stay with Shirley.” Bring me over, said Mr.

Takahashi. “That’s okay, we’ll stay here,” she said.

“You home, you home now!” I could hear him yell over the telephone.

“Don’t worry, Pop,” Midori said, and she put the telephone in the cradle.

We sat in the kitchen and ate teriyaki chicken and deviled eggs. Later, we played

Chinese checkers and I won. Then we made origami cranes and put the candles on my

cake, but we didn’t light them and we didn’t cut the cake.

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Tomio

He headed the gray-green DeSoto down Beacon Hill, past the Chinese Baptist Church, past

the Italian truck gardens in the Rainier Valley that the old-timers called Garlic Gulch, in the

direction of the mountain looming ghost-like in the distance. Mount Rainier reminded him

of the painted screen of Mount Fuji he had seen at the Musée des Beaux Arts. He had

been held for three days in the immigration quarters in San Francisco Bay until his sponsor

arrived to verify that the young man, Tomio Omori, had come to America to study

Economics at the University of Washington. On his first and only day in San Francisco,

the sponsor, who had been a guest in his father’s house in Kyoto, took him on a tour of the

city, ending at the marbled entry of the museum. The twenty-one-year-old had little desire

to see artifacts from his homeland on his first free day in America, but he dutifully

followed the kindly white man who gazed with nostalgia at silken kimonos and gold-leafed

screens. A week later, when he stood on a bluff over Seattle staring at Mount Rainier in

the distance, Tomio remembered the gilded screen of Fuji-san that had stretched across an

entire wall of the museum.

Thirty-two years later, on the day of his daughter’s sixth birthday, he drove south

on Rainier Avenue toward the public golf course. Later, he could only dimly remember

reaching into the hall closet for his golf bag. He couldn’t recall opening the closet door or

putting on his leather jacket or his billed cap. Had he said something to his wife about

calming his nerves?

It was incomprehensible. Rumors had been trickling for months. News of

invasions and takeovers and puppet states—reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

Seattle Times, the bilingual North American Post. His two countries, enemies now. In his

grandfather’s time—how long ago?—they had been allies. He had been a school boy.

How could things go so wrong in such a short time? Yet, even in his own home domestic

storms brewed, storms he was powerless to stop, unable to understand. But war?

Mount Rainier stretched before him. The Japanese in America, especially farmers

from Hiroshima, loved Rainier-san for its symmetry, its kimochi—the flavor, the feel—of

their Mount Fuji. The Puyallup Indians had their name for it. Tomio wondered how it

must have been, before telephone lines, before traffic, farms, and towns, to step into a

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clearing after miles of dense forest and encounter the sacred mountain Ta-ho-ma, sun

glinting off its slopes. The woods were gone, the Indians nearly so. Only the mountain

remained, implacable and eternal. Now he, Tomio Omori, whose father had devoted his

life to the rule of law, whose brothers served in the Imperial Navy, whose mother and

sisters were members of the International Red Cross and the Japan-America Friendship

Society, was not only a registered alien but a danger to his adopted country. As of this day

he was an enemy alien, and he was driving toward the only course where he, a yellow man,

was permitted to play golf. Incomprehensible.

Icy drizzle was turning into snow. He started the windshield wipers.

Suddenly, he cranked the wheel left, crossed the median line, and turned in the

direction from which he had come. He drove past China Town, Japan Town and Little

Manila, past the Smith Tower and downtown and toward the madrona-lined streets around

Lake Washington. He entered the evergreen splendor of the University Arboretum, past

the gates of the Japanese tea garden, and drove over the Montlake drawbridge onto the

campus, then west around algae-glazed Green Lake and north toward the increasingly large

homes and verdant spaces of private communities. The DeSoto idled outside an ivy-

covered wall, beyond which stood the pro shop, the practice tee, and the golf course of the

country club where Tomio had served as weekend barman for fourteen springs and

summers.

He pulled the automobile close to the wall. His golf bag had ridden with him like a

silent friend, and he removed it from the passenger side and leaned it against the car. He

opened the trunk and located his golf shoes, tied the laces together, and flung the shoes

over the wall. Pushing off from the running board, he stood on the hood of his car, then

clambered onto the roof, and pulled his golf bag toward him. He removed his belt, buckled

it tightly around the bag, and hoisted it, like an adagio dancer, over his head. Rocking

backward, then forward, he heaved the bag over the wall and was relieved to hear a dull,

compact thud instead of the clangor of irons. Thinking humorously of Douglas Fairbanks,

he leapt at the ledge, reached it but lost his grip, his fingers sliding helplessly, then grabbed

fistfuls of vines that held his weight, and climbed, hand over hand, to the top of the wall.

Lying face down on the narrow ledge, he caught his breath, then eased his body over the

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side. Dropping almost soundlessly to the ground, he picked up his bag and unbuckled the

belt around it. In the fading light, on his hands and knees, he groped for his shoes, which

had separated. One hung by its lace from a hawthorn bush; its mate lay in a bed of winter

pansies. Even in December, the grass grew as thick and green as an expensive carpet.

He had always believed that golf was the most human of games, full of highs and

lows and inequities. He knew that every golfer had good luck and bad luck but that in the

most intimate way, a golf course was an even playing field. Instead of physical risk (unless

you played with Archie Noguchi, who swung his driver like a baseball bat), the kind of

nerve required of the game came from patience, fortitude, forgiveness. Gaman, with

humility.

The best golf was played in a state of forgetfulness, concentration untouched by

thought. He knew that he’d had days in which hundreds of hours of practice swings and

putts had brought him to a state of pure breath and muscle memory, a state of superb play.

He knew he’d probably have a few more such days, but could never predict when they

would occur. Hitting a small ball with a long stick alone on a darkening day, off-season

and on forbidden ground, appealed to his sense of the absurd.

He loved the long strides down the fairway after he’d hit the ball; he loved the way

the white flag that marked the hole fluttered in the breeze; most of all, he loved the calm

that swept over him as he stood on the green to angle a putt. To him, the rules of the game

were the rules of civility. Step to the tee carrying at least two balls in your pocket; if you

need to hit a second ball it’s bad manners to make others wait while you return to your bag.

Have enough tees and know where your ball marker is. Care for your clubs. Brush and

polish your golf shoes.

Since early fall, a snarling slice had infected his game. He had no idea how he

would fare this day. He was losing the light. Snow flurries spun around him, and he blew

on his icy hands before he pulled the driver out of his bag. He slid one hand down the shaft

and rubbed the persimmon-wood of the club head, like a trainer rubbing an athlete’s leg, or

for luck—he wasn’t sure. He folded his fingers around the leather grip and placed his club

head on the ground. He positioned his feet, taking a slightly open stance, relaxing his

knees. He remembered Sam Snead’s wiggle-waggle and he loosened his hips, thinking of

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hula dancers. Supinate, a voice came like a whisper in the wind. Turn the hand and

forearm so that the palm is upward. He supinated his left wrist, feeling coiled and poised

behind the ball. Brush, brush, don’t think. Brush the grass. He felt a calmness he always

worked toward but had rarely known. Snow swirled around him like fallen cherry

blossoms.

When he pulled the club head away from his address, strength coursed through him

that was perfect in its ease. The club descended and—bruush—swept the ball from the tee.

He immediately felt the difference in his right hip; his right foot pointed toward the ball,

and he watched it fly higher than he had ever sent a ball. He walked briskly to the fairway

and hit a wedge to within six feet of the hole for a two-putt par. At number two, a medium-

length par five, he drew his two-iron, set up, aimed slightly left of the flag, and fired. The

ball soared down the fairway, landed softly at the front of the green, and rolled up about ten

feet away from an eagle. He tapped in and went to the third tee. He played the course,

nine holes, in the dying day, incredulously scoring a thirty-three. He knew that he, Tommy

the bar man, had broken the course record.

The streets were dark and familiar as he made his way home. He had stopped off at

Moriyama’s grocery store for a carton of Neapolitan ice cream, but it was shut down, a sign

reading, “Closed in sorrow for America. God bless America,” taped to the darkened

window pane. When he walked into Wilson’s grocery, silent hard looks surrounded him

and the radio hammered out the same, astonishing news.

Sachi

When Daddy came home, Midori told him that Mama had gone out. He looked worried,

but he thanked her and said he’d drive her home.

“That's okay, Mr. Omori,” Midori said. “I got my skates.”

“Sollee, Midori,” Daddy said. “Sollee.”

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He sat on the sofa and put his face in his hands. “Does your head hurt, Daddy?” I

patted the top of his head. He took my hand between his two big ones and looked at me a

long time. Then he put me on his lap and squeezed me.

“I can't breathe Daddy!” I said, but I liked it.

When Mama came home, Daddy rushed to the door. Where you been?

Movie. I wanted to sit in the dark.

She gave me Hershey kisses out of her handbag.

“Which movie?” I asked.

Tin Pan Alley at the Wintergarden, she said. Then she told me to go to bed. School

tomorrow.

Daddy said leave me be, it's my birthday, but she said I was getting too excited:

sweaty, red in the face. I thought of Archie Noguchi when he drank beer, of Mama when

she got mad.

All right, all right, said Daddy. Put on your nightgown. Then we’ll have cake and

ice cream before you go to bed. Mama agreed.

When the doorbell rang Mama called for Daddy, but he was in the bathroom. More

ringing, knocking, then voices. I sat in the kitchen eating Neapolitan ice cream and

birthday cake: “Happy Birthday Shulee.” I licked the frosting off Shirley Temple's legs.

The door swung open, and a pink-faced man leaned in.

“What have we here?” he said, and he took off his hat. His hair was the color of

carrots. He walked in, opened the broom closet, the pantry door, even the narrow door that

held the ironing board. He went out on the porch, leaving the back door open. I was cold.

When he returned, he told Mama, "Cute baby."

"I'm six!" I said, and he laughed. It was a nice sound.

Another man was in the house. He banged on the bathroom door and talked in a

loud voice. The toilet flushed but Daddy didn't come out. The other man was older than

the one with carrot hair; he didn't take off his brown hat. “Go around the side,” he said.

“Check the windows.” Mama was crying.

“Tomio! Tomio!” She talked to the door. There were giants in our house.

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When Daddy came out of the bathroom, he nodded to Mr. Brown Hat. He saw me

standing in the hall, and he put a smile on his face and walked toward me. Mr. Brown Hat

grabbed his arm and Mama gasped, but Daddy picked me up anyway. He told me I had a

chocolate mustache and tickled my stomach.

The carrot-haired man came in from outside and wiped his feet on the welcome

mat. "What's her name?" he asked.

“Shulee Tempu,” Mama said.

“Pardon?” said the FBI man.

These scenes are like tessarae that catch the light of memory. Some are as true to me as

if I had been there—my mother, on tiptoe, shouting up at an imperious saleswoman; the

perfume of lilies and roses that crowded her hospital room on the day of my birth; the

white of the snow banks into which my father hit his golf balls the night of my sixth

birthday. The doctor who confirmed my mother’s pregnancy—his name was Dr.

Moon—the ride downtown from his office in the Checkered Cab, the green-uniformed

doorman, the brightness of Frederick & Nelson: all were part of my mother’s lore, tales

that followed her into the nursing home, into dementia and death. She never talked about

the camps nor, once it’d been bundled in blankets and mothballs into a trunk that

disappeared forever, the Shirley Temple doll. These details, I suppose, are left for me to

sift and piece into my own life’s mosaic.

But missing is the bright tessara of my father. I never saw him again after the

visit of the brown-hatted agent and his orange-haired partner. After camp, my mother

refused to return to the Pacific Northwest and we were swept into the diaspora of

internees who struck out for Chicago, or Des Moines, or for a tenement in Queens. When

my father was released from enemy alien camp in 1945, he returned to Seattle to await

clearance to join us. A month later, he collapsed on the eighth hole of the Jefferson

public course, a frantic Archie at his side. He died in the ambulance on the way to the

hospital.

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Lost too are my father’s letters to me, stamped “Enemy Alien Mail” and sent to

Camp Minidoka. My mother must have translated them, but I remember only that she

said they were written in an old-fashioned Japanese script. I remember too, these many

years later, his soft voice, his steady gentleman’s hands.

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II. Harmony

1.

Spruce Street was one of the pick-up points to Wisteria Park. By ten o’clock, boxes,

suitcases, and duffle bags covered our lawn. I had never seen so many people since the

Japanese American Citizens League picnic in Volunteer Park.

They rang the doorbell and banged the screen door. They asked to use the kitchen

or the bathroom—to wash their hands—go potty—get a drink of water—change the baby’s

diaper. Upstairs, Mama packed and unpacked and changed her mind. Mink hat, no.

Alligator shoes, better not. Rabbit fur earmuffs, yes. Wool gabardine coat, yes. Pink

flannel jacket, yes—no—yes. I carried my teddy bear.

Midori and her sisters packed Shirley Temple in her glass case and the Japanese

dolls in their little ones and carried the trunk to the church basement. Reverend Koyano

and Midori’s father had been taken away the same night as Daddy and the Fuller Brush

man, but Reverend Adams and his sons helped everyone push boxes and trunks and

furniture covered with sheets into every corner of the attic and basement.

Two soldiers jumped out of the Greyhound bus and told everyone to pay attention. One

soldier had a clipboard and called out names.

Mama and I stepped up and the soldier put a checkmark next to our names. The

other soldier gave Mama two tags with numbers on them. String was hanging from a hole

in the tag. Mama knotted the ends and put the tag around my neck.

“Ta-naka! I-chi-ro and Fu-mi-ko!” shouted the soldier.

The Tanakas lived next door. Mr. Tanaka owned a stall in the Pike Street Market

and grew vegetables on the lot that dipped down to the woods behind our neighborhood.

Mama said the Tanakas were inaka kusai—stinking of country.

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A woman holding a little girl stepped up and said they were Tanakas. “Are you I-

chi-ro and Fu-mi-ko?” asked the soldier. “No, Michi and Julie,” the woman said. He

turned the page and found their names, then called out again for Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka.

Another Greyhound bus and more soldiers in Army trucks pulled up. Long knives

were attached to the guns the soldiers carried. Some of them helped pile our things on the

trucks and some stood guard.

“Maybe they gonna shoot us,” said a woman in line.

“Nah,” said a man. “We gonna go Puyallup.”

The soldier kept calling the Tanakas. The soldiers with the guns moved toward

their house. We heard shrill barking.

Mr. Tanaka came out of his yard, holding Suzy the Pomeranian. She wore a pink

ribbon and a bell on her collar. Mrs. Tanaka walked behind him with Magdalena

Mandapat, who owned the Philippine gift shop at the Market. Mrs. Tanaka carried a

wicker basket full of turnips and daikon radishes she put on Mr. and Mrs. Chang’s doorstep

across the street.

“Look at Tanaka-san,” someone said.

Mr. Tanaka was wearing his American Army uniform from World War I.

Everybody stopped talking and stared. He walked up to the soldier calling his name and

saluted. The soldier hesitated, then saluted back. Everybody started talking again.

When Mr. Tanaka reached the bus, he turned to Magdalena and put Suzy in her

arms. Magdalena’s husband and four children carried out the Tanakas’ luggage. The

driver turned on the engine and everyone scrambled aboard.

Mrs. Tanaka waved out the window. “Bye-bye. Sayonara.” Mr. Tanaka looked

straight ahead.

When we got to Wisteria Park behind the Buddhist Church, more buses, army trucks, and

jeeps waited. Archie and Grace stood in the middle of a pile of boxes and bags. Eleanor

and her mother sat on a small trunk. Dougie was crying because he had left his John Deere

tractor behind. An old man leaning on a cane opened his coat to show Archie and Grace

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the two sweaters and a suit he wore under his overcoat. Two pairs of socks, too, he told

them, and pulled up his pant leg. “Take only what you can carry, they said.”

Mrs. Koyano and Eleanor told him they were each wearing three layers of clothes

over a pair of slacks. The people around them laughed. Everyone had hung their tags

around their necks or pinned them to their coats.

“I’m not a piece of luggage,” said Archie, and he yanked off his tag.

Grace bent down and picked the tag off the ground. She handed it to him, but he

pushed it away.

A roar of engines and the caravan pulled out, past the wisteria bushes, past the blue-

green spruces and the semi-circle of Japanese cherry trees, a gift to the city from the

Emperor of Japan, past the giant bell that hung in the outdoor shrine. A man in line to

board the last bus ran to the bell. He pulled the clapper three times. The bell swayed and

resounded, and the man ran back to the bus.

The city looked dreamy and distant. Fog shrouded the top of the Smith Tower,

which Daddy told me was the tallest building in the West. Someone pointed to the way

Boeing Field was camouflaged by thick netting that covered the buildings and airstrip.

Midori said, “Look,” and we craned our necks to see the dirigibles that hung

overhead. “In case of enemy fire,” said someone. Soon there were miles of empty fields.

When we arrived in Puyallup, Mama shook me awake. We went through the gate.

Overhead, a high guard tower. Jeeps, Army trucks, more soldiers. Our bags hauled out of

the buses, thrown down from the backs of the trucks. I followed Mama and stood in the

parking lot, rubbing my eyes. Emptied, the buses and trucks left in a roar of engines.

Where was my teddy bear? I began to cry. Mama went to the soldier with the

clipboard. He leaned toward her and she shouted up at him, waving her hands. Finally, she

pointed at me and cradled her arms. “It’s my teddy,” I said. Then we were riding in a jeep,

chasing our bus.

The fairground was spooky under fluorescent lights, a giant ghost town. The roller

coaster tracks and Ferris wheel towered overhead like the skeletons of dinosaurs. We

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drove toward a line of buses lumbering out of the gate. The kind soldier jumped out and

chased them, but they were too many to catch.

“Aw. Sorry little girl.” He leaned against the jeep, out of breath.

In the parking lot, numbers were being called: this group takes the stables and animal pens,

that group to the new barracks, another group under the grandstands. Bachelors, across the

street. Archie and Grace were assigned the new barracks, where the wood was green and

would shrink as it aged. Mama and I were in the stables, on the other side of the

fairgrounds. Midori turned and yelled to us, “We got under the grandstand.”

“Follow me, ladies and gentlemen,” said another man with a clipboard. “Take

what you need for the night. You’ll get the rest later.” We looked back at mountains of

suitcases, trunks, duffle bags, bundles wrapped with rope.

The Tanakas walked in our group, but no one talked. We stopped at each stall as

the man called out the numbers. When we got to 9 and 10, I clapped my hands. “We’re

next door neighbors again!” I told Mrs. Tanaka. Mama walked into stall 9 and shut the

creaky door. A baby named Susumu—Sammy—and his mother and father lived in

Number 8. His mother said he was “colicky.”

I sat outside with Mrs. Tanaka, and she peeled me a potato. She had filled her

pockets with apples and potatos and her sweater sagged almost to the ground. Mr. Tanaka

lay on his cot inside, staring at the ceiling; I was a little scared of him.

Mama sat on a cot in our stall, waving her lace hanky in front of her face. It had

been hosed out when the horses were moved, and the wall steamed in the heat. Mama’s

black-and-white spectator shoes were covered with dust. I looked down and saw that my

Mary Janes were too.

Don’t blame America, Mama said, twisting her handkerchief. Have gaman. Stiff

upper lip. Shikataganai. It can’t be helped.

Under the grandstand, rows of cots stretched as far as we could see.

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An old man lay on a cot, hands clasped behind his head. Have you seen the

Takahashis? Mama asked. “Dunno,” he said.

In the next row, a little girl lay on her side, sucking her thumb. A woman sat on the

edge of the cot, knitting. Her ball of bright yarn rolled on the concrete floor. She didn’t

know either.

We wandered into a place where concession signs and posters with smiling faces

covered the walls. Bon Marché, Frederick & Nelson, Rhodes Department Store. “You

Can Count On Us.” “Service with a Smile.” “The Customer Is Always Right.”

“Mrs. Omori! Shirley!” Eleanor zigzagged her way toward us. She was wearing

her favorite green-and-blue skirt, but the pleats were smashed. “We’re way over there.”

She pointed to a sea of beds. Suitcases, books, bundles of clothing covered some of the

cots; people sat or lay on others.

Eleanor led us to Midori and her mother and sisters, who had dragged five cots to

an alcove in the old concession area. The wooden concession stand where I used to buy

Aplets and Cotlets and Frango mint chocolates still stood.

“It’s got shelves,” said Midori, and took us behind the stand, where she and her

sisters had arranged their belongings. On the counter, her mother had made a small

butsudan, with a candle and brass bell sitting next to a small wooden Buddha and a bowl

that held an apple, a rice cake, and a stick of Doublemint gum.

Isn’t it lucky we’re near the bathroom! Midori’s mother waved happily at us.

“Make mattresses,” said the block captain. He pointed to stacks of hay and burlap bags.

The grownups began filling the bags, while we kids played. Tubby Watanabe and Mimi

Sakata were from the farmlands near Kent. Bobby Yoshino came from the Green River

Valley. We met bouncing in the hay.

Back in our stalls, the hot breath of night released animal odors that had been baked

into the boards. Lights out. Searchlights on. The dense murmur of voices. Tubby

Watanabe’s, “It stinks in here.” A door creaked open, then slammed shut when Tubby’s

father left for the latrines. He returned, complaining that the searchlights were blinding.

Coughing and spitting and Buddhist prayers. Baby Sammy’s wailing.

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I lay on my straw mattress, soaked with sweat, itchy in a hundred places. Mama

said to stop rustling and go to sleep. I counted sheep like Midori taught me.

In the underworld of our mattresses, the straw bristled with invisible creatures.

I am being rocked. But the hands that rock me are rough, and my head jerks back and

forth. A demon sits on my bed; it glowers in the dark, eyes red hot, mouth full of fangs.

Far away, a small animal cries in hoarse, staccato bursts. There is no air; the itching is

unbearable. I dig my nails into my skin and slide them up and down my arms, across my

legs; I can smell my blood and sweat. A shrieky sound fills the room, like opera-singing.

“Make-me-curaazy!” the demon screeches. “No sku-ratch, you!”

The demon strikes at the air; the whirl of hands creates a breeze. “No sku-ratch!”

The whirling turns into slaps, small stings that relieve my itching. The slaps grow harder,

no longer open-handed, but fistfuls of thuds.

“Mama! Stop! Hurts!”

I turn over on my stomach, press my face into the mattress. The blows come

harder, faster. In the distance, a baby howls. Where is my father to say no more, that’s

enough, she’s only a child? Where is Midori to take me away “before you get on your

Mom’s nerves”? Where is my teddy bear—speeding away alone in the dark?

A noise. Is it real? Three knocks on the wall. Yes, real.

The demon stops. Who is hammering in the middle of the night? Shhh. She turns

me over. Three more knocks, softer now.

“No cry. Shut up!” Her hand covers my mouth. “Tanaka,” she whispers.

Busybody. Mind your own business.

Thank you, thank you, Mama stops. She wilts into a tangle of hair and wrinkled

nightgown. She lies on her side and draws up her knees, pulls up the sheet and stuffs the

end of the sheet in her mouth. I huddle on my cot and count the number of times the

searchlight shines through cracks in the wood. The night noises fade. Baby Sammy is still;

on the other side, the Tanakas snore. I crawl to the other cot and lie in the curve of my

mother’s stomach. I fall asleep to her muffled cries.

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In the morning, I burn with fever. Mama sits beside me and pours water from a

canteen into her handkerchief. The top of the stable door is open. When a breeze enters

the room, I think it is a wild bird.

2.

It was called Camp Harmony. “Temporary,” said one woman. Sounds like tempura, said

Mama, and everyone laughed, Mama too. She was pretty when she laughed.

Baby Sammy’s mother said she was dying for shrimp tempura. Another lady said

she wanted a sweet potato one, the kind her obasan used to make, with a splash of vinegar.

Then everybody talked about the best way to make sushi and the different kinds of udon—

brown noodles and fat noodles and cold, clean, slippery thin noodles—and how to keep the

tempura batter from getting lumpy. There were jokes abut Spam tempura.

They were sitting outside the laundry room, smoking and talking over the noise of

the wringer washers. It was a good day for laundry, bright and calm. For days the

sandstorms had made it impossible to hang wash in the open air.

Sammy’s mother sat on an apple box holding Sammy, who nuzzled into her blouse.

Mrs. Tanaka stood on tiptoe to hang her wash, wooden clothes pins in her mouth. Mr.

Tanaka and another man played Go on a crooked card table in the dirt. Mama had folded a

newspaper into a fan and waved it lazily in front of her face. She wore a peach-colored

blouse with a Peter Pan collar and stood out from the women in their cotton prints and

wrinkled aprons. She was in a good mood and didn’t look mad that Sammy’s mother was

giving him milk from her chichi.

The guards at the gate flirted with Eleanor Koyano and her girlfriends, but they yelled at us

kids when we played near the barbed wire. At the Fourth of July pick-up game, Bobby

Yoshino threw a wild ball over Tubby Watanabe’s head and it stuck in the fence. When

Tubby ran after it, the tower started shooting.

Bam! Bam! Bambambam! The bullets kicked up dust that filled my eyes and

mouth. I stood, paralyzed, my pinafore splattered with dirt and gravel. Then I dropped to

the ground and curled into a ball. I knew I was choking and my nose was dripping blood,

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that there was a crunchy taste in my mouth like I’d chewed a roll of Lifesavers. The other

kids were screaming and my throat hurt with screaming too, but I couldn’t hear above the

noise. Bam bambam! I tasted the blood dripping from my nose. My eyes were glued shut

by dirt and tears. Something warm trickled down my legs and I knew I had wet my pants.

I opened my eyes and saw running feet. Straw sandals. Olive green pants. Bodies

hovering over us. Work shirts. Undershirts. Hairy armpits. An apron with yellow and

white daisies. The bullets had stopped and everyone was talking at once. A rock had

ricocheted and hit Mimi Sakata in the forehead. Blood dripped from the gash. She cried,

“I can’t see!” Two sets of Army boots carried her away.

Tubby Watanabe lay face down on the ground next to me. I sat up, but Tubby

didn’t move. His mother and father ran up screaming, He’s dead! He’s dead! and flung

their bodies over him. Tubby tilted his head and said, “Ma, I can’t breathe,” and she sat up

like lightning had hit her. He’s alive! He’s alive! Tubby’s father went bolt upright too,

and all three of them sat in the dirt rocking and crying. Everybody who stood on the sides

cried and hung on to somebody else. It was the first time I ever saw Japanese people

hugging.

I was glad Mama wasn’t there because I wasn’t supposed to be playing with Mimi

Sakata or Tubby Watanabe, or any of the country kids. I had torn and dirtied my pink-and-

white pinafore. I knew I was going to get it when Mama returned from mess hall duty. I

sat in the dirt and stared at my bloody knees.

Mr. Tanaka stepped out of the crowd and scooped me up. I wrapped my legs

around his middle and my arms around his neck. I felt his heart pumping as he ran. He

was very strong. His brown skin shone like wet leather; his gray mustache felt itchy on my

cheek.

“Fumi!” he yelled, and kicked open the door to his stall. He put me on a cot and

leaned over me. I smelled dried fish on his breath. “Fumi!” His eyebrows were bushy

and gray and made his eyes look like an eagle’s. He tilted my face in his hands and looked

at the bruise on my forehead. His hands felt like sandpaper but were gentle.

Mrs. Tanaka ran in carrying her laundry basket. “Do shite?” What happened?

“Ara!” She ran out and came back with a bucket of water. She washed me and dried me

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with a clean towel from her laundry basket. It was still warm from hanging out in the sun.

I talked about the shooting and she kept shaking her head and frowning, but she laughed

when I told her about Tubby Watanabe coming back to life. At last, she folded her

wrinkled hands in her lap. “Gaman nasai, Sachi-san,ne?” Have gaman, okay?

Mr. Tanaka said nothing. He walked me to the First Aid Station, where he put

iodine and band-aids on my elbows and knees and a square of gauze on my forehead.

He waited for Mama to return from mess hall duty, and they went inside our stall. I

stayed next door with Mrs. Tanaka. I could hear Mr. Tanaka on the other side of the wall,

but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Mama’s voice went high at first, then soft. Mr.

Tanaka’s rumbling voice went on for a long time and Mama was quiet. When she came

over, she picked me up, even though my dress was torn and dirty. She didn’t get mad when

I whispered that I had wet my pants. Inside our stall, she removed the ruined pinafore

without saying a word. She lifted my arms and slid an undershirt, then my nightgown, over

my head. Then she took out a lacquered box from the duffle bag under the cot and

unlocked it with a tiny key on a chain around her neck. She took out a black velvet pouch,

small and flat, and pinned the pouch to my undershirt.

“Keep you safe-u,” she said.

“Can I open it?” My hand reached toward my shirt.

“Nevah open,” she said. “Belong kamisama.” God. There was special paper inside

the pouch, she explained. With scared prayers for protection. She closed her eyes and

thumped on her heart three times with her fist. I was surprised; we were supposed to be

Christian and American.

Mama took a tin box out of the duffle where she kept the special treats she’d

brought from home: Red Vines licorice and Juicy Fruit gum and Tootsie Rolls and two

peppermint sticks she was saving for Christmas. One of the peppermint sticks was broken.

She removed the cellophane and put the pieces in my hand. “Eat,” she said, and I crunched

the candy in my mouth. Then she took out my sterling silver baby cup on which “Shirley-

Temple Sachiko Omori” was engraved in fancy writing. She went to the bucket in the

corner and ladled water into the cup. She put the last peppermint stick in the cup and I

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sucked on it like it was a straw. I slurped and smacked my lips and said “Ahhh,” the way

Daddy did when he ate long noodles, and Mama didn’t mind at all.

3.

The move was made at dawn. The government wanted to transport them quickly without

attracting the attention of the town. Seven-hundred men, women, and children, dressed as

if they were on their way to church, walked silently in the dark. They carried the

possessions they’d brought with them earlier in the spring, stuffed once again into duffles

or bulky bundles, into luggage sets, trunks, or boxes tied with rope. Some carried sleeping

children. Some leaned on canes or crutches. Outside the gate, a line of drab green Army

trucks and converted school buses waited. Two soldiers peered down from the guard

tower. Three others stood on the ground. The guard who lifted the wooden barrier was the

one her friends called “Eleanor’s soldier.” When she walked by, the soldier mouthed,

“Good luck.” She smiled and fluttered her fingers at him. Her mother glared.

The caravan bounced along an alternate route from the main highway. No one

talked; some slumped in their seats and slept; others looked out the windows, staring at

haystacks and scarecrows silhouetted across the Puyallup Valley. As darkness lifted, light

glinted across the hop fields. It was a white-hot day by the time they reached the train, a

patient, rusting beast sitting on open tracks. There was no station or platform, only the vast

sky that met the land and the narrow dry road that ribboned the route from which they had

come. The tracks stretched to a mysterious vanishing point.

Soldiers, helmeted and bayoneted, disembarked from their transports and instructed

them to line up, single file, along the length of the train. “Firing squad style,” someone

muttered, recalling the “Maybe they gonna shoot us” of Wisteria Park. When roll was

called, a sigh of relief pulsed through the crowd.

A signal was given and they clambered onto the train. Some elders had to be

helped. A blind man carried a white cane. A senile woman sat in the hard-backed chair

her grandson had made from apple crates. She refused to give up her chair. When they

strapped her in it and lifted her onto the train, she waved imperiously to the crowd.

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The cars filled with activity. People jostled for seats and parents called to children

who were running up and down the aisles.

“Look Ma!” said a small voice. “The windows, they’re blacked out.”

“How can we tell where we’re going?” said someone. There was no reply.

In the heat of the railway car, the peanut-butter sandwiches Yuki had packed melted

into an oily ooze and the hard-boiled eggs turned sulfurous. Sachi lay across her mother’s

lap. Yuki had piled the seat opposite them with belongings so that no one could sit with

them. She wanted no more of crying babies and tiresome adults.

She pulled the letter out of her purse. In nine months she’d received only this one

heavily censored letter from Tomio, without a location on the postmark and stamped

“enemy alien mail.” Entire paragraphs were blacked out, but she decipher read enough to

learn that he and the others were together and safe. He told her she was never far from his

thoughts. He called her “my life.”

Baby Sammy and his mother and father sat facing the Tanakas, who rode

backwards. Sammy’s face was scarlet from prickly heat; the milk that he pulled from his

mother’s teats soured on his lips. Tubby Watanabe and his parents occupied the opposite

aisle. Mr. Watanabe wore a black suit shiny with age and the stiff-looking shirt his wife

had yanked from the clothesline minutes before leaving Puyallup. The shirt was once

gleaming white but had yellowed from Camp Harmony laundry bar washings. It used to

hang on the clothesline outside the horse stall, looking as if an invisible person was

wearing it. Sometimes a hot wind blew across camp and the shirt danced on the line like a

headless ghost. Now it wore the wizened body of Mr. Watanabe, who the children of camp

compared to Jack Spratt of the nursery rhyme. Roly-poly Mrs. Watanabe was, of course,

the wife who could eat no lean; and even the grown-ups chuckled that their son Tadeo—

“Chubby”—was his mother’s “spit and image.”

Mrs. Watanabe sat with closed eyes. She rolled a string of Buddhist prayer beads in

her doughy hands. Soft, droning noises floated from her swiftly moving lips.

“Don’t use benjo. Toilet stop up,” someone shouted. “Mess up all over floor.”

Ma, ma. Hidoi ne, said Mr. Watanabe, lifting his bony feet over the streaming

effluvia. Hideous.

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III. In the Magic Valley

1.

The man jumped off the back of the army truck and poured water from a jug over his

neckerchief. Without bothering to wring it, he wound it around his neck. The water ran in

black rivulets, soaking into the shirt plastered against his body.

“Where are we?” someone said, squinting into the light.

“Goddamn Buddhist hell,” said the man. He emptied the jug over his head.

At ten below, mothers made masks from army blankets—cutouts for eyes, slits at the nose,

a tiny “o” for the mouth. The children stomped to their barracks classrooms across the

frozen ground, looking like wind-up toys stuffed into snowsuits.

Sachi turned seven her first December in Minidoka and celebrated on December 6.

Yuki spent December 7 day in bed, sending Sachi to Midori’s barracks on the other end of

camp. A birthday package from Tomio didn’t arrive until February. “Think of it as a

Valentine present,” said Midori.

Sachi sat on the barracks steps and opened the cardboard box mailed from the

canteen of her father’s prison camp. Lifesavers, Red Vines, and Wrigley chewing gum. A

comic book about an international team of Europeans, Chinese, and Americans fighting

yellow-faced, buck-toothed soldiers, charging with bayonets, screaming, “Yankee dog, you

die!” A greeting card with a drawing of Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the reader. “Yes,

you! I want you.” Opened, the card read, “To Have a Happy Birthday!” It was unsigned.

But tucked in a corner of the box was a tissue-wrapped pair of beaded Navajo moccasins

and a 3 x 5 file card in her father’s print. “To my Sachiko. Daddy.”

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2.

It was spring and the rains came, and our camp was a big mud puddle. One day, Bobby

Yoshino dared me to walk through the mud on our way to school.

“ I’ll get dirty.”

“For Pete’s sake, you got your boots on.”

But I made my way along the slippery planks that lay across the puddle.

“Sissy,” he said, and marched into the black water. He whooped and hollered,

“Come on, Shirley. It’s fun!” but when he was up to his ankles, he began to strain,

sloughing forward like a plow horse with a heavy load. He was sinking, almost to his

knees.

“Help me.”

I held out my hand, but I couldn’t reach him. I lay down on the plank and stretched

out my arm. He threw me his book bag and I grabbed the straps and got to my knees,

pulling as hard as I could, but Bobby was dragging me off the plank. I had to let go and I

fell back hard on my oshiri. The book bag splashed into the mud. Bobby was still

standing, stuck like a pole in cement.

“We’re going to be late, Bobby.”

“Oh, shut up. Get some help.” He looked like he was going to cry. “Hey, here

comes a guy. Ojisan! Mister!”

A skinny man wearing unbuckled fisherman’s boots was striding toward us. He

walked into the water like the man in the seven-league boots and grabbed Bobby from

under the arms. He pulled, one, two, three times until there was a sucking sound and

Bobby was lifted up, socks dangling from his feet.

“Gee, thanks,” said Bobby.

The skinny man plunked him on the plank, then picked up his book bag.

“Mister! What about my boots?”

“No time,” the man said. The buckles of his boots jingled as he walked away.

When Bobby got to school, he stuck out his muddy stockings for Show and talked

about how they got that way for Tell. I kneeled on the floor and showed how I tried to

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rescue him. Mud flaked off my dress and arms. At recess, Miss Whitman sent the janitor

for Bobby’s boots.

On the way home, we saw the skinny man behind the Block 43 mess hall.

“Look,” Bobby said. “It’s him.”

He had on a chef’s hat and a stained, white apron and was hoisting garbage cans in

the same way he had lifted Bobby out of the mud.

3.

Tommy Ono was the leader of the Puget Island bad boys. He and his baby brother and

three sisters lived next door to Mama and me on Block 44. He was nine. His mother and

father and almost everybody on Puget Island were farmers. Inaka kusai. Mama said to

stay away from them.

The first thing Tommy Ono said to me was, “What’s that foo-foo?

“It’s my dress.”

“How come it sticks out like that?”

“It’s crinoline. My mother starches it.”

The next morning, he was waiting on the barrack steps. With him were the bad boys.

“How come your dress sticks out like that?” said one.

“Maybe her oshiri’s that big,” said another.

“Nah, she’s a mama’s girl. Her mama starches her fancy-antsy dresses.”

“Does her mama starch her hair too?”

“Yah, she’s stuck up like her mama. Thinks she’s a movie star.”

“She’s rich. My ma says there’s gold bars stacked to the ceiling in their room.”

Bobby Yoshino was waiting for me at the next barrack. He took one look at the bad

boys following me and ran back in. When he came out, it was with Tubby Watanabe, who

carried a baseball bat.

“See you later, movie star,” said Tommy. He tucked his thumbs into the buckles of

his overalls and strolled away. The bad boys followed him.

At school, Mimi Sakata said I should report Tommy Ono. “Okay,” I said, but I knew

I wouldn’t. I didn’t know why.

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The next morning, I told Mama I didn’t feel good. She made me okai, rice porridge,

in a pan on the potbelly stove and told me to stay in bed. But the next day, she made me go

to school.

“Hey, where were you?” said Tommy.

He was sitting on the school steps, whittling an eagle out of ironwood. He slipped its

wing into the loop of the bow on my dress and yanked. I began to cry.

“Sissy,” he said, and spat on the ground. The bad boys spat too.

Next day, Mimi told me she’d told her mother, who’d told the block leader, who

would tell Tommy Ono’s father.

I stayed in the barrack at suppertime and munched on crackers. Mama had mess hall

duty and didn’t miss me. I lay on my cot and watched the sun glow into the barrack and

turn the room orange, then lavender, then black. I heard Tommy run up the stairs to his

side of the barrack and slam the door. Through the partition, I heard the bang of the

potbelly stove, the scuffling of feet, and Tommy bouncing a ball off the wall. Pretty soon, I

heard Mr. Ono sludge up the steps and the door creak open and shut. I heard the murmur

of voices, Mr. Ono’s gravely Japanese, and Tommy’s half-Japanese, half-English. Then I

heard the sound of paddling and Tommy’s wailing, and I threw the covers over my head.

Mama came back with Spam and lima beans, but I pretended to be asleep and pretty soon I

was.

Next morning at school, Tommy was not to be found. He wasn’t in the art room or

the music room, and he didn’t show up in the map room. But at recess, he walked up to

me, his hands tucked in the bib of his overalls. He took out his hand and made a fist, and I

thought he was going to hit me. Instead, he stuck out his thumb and dragged it slowly

across his throat. The bad boys did the same. “You’re going to get it. Wait and see.”

Tommy Ono jammed his hands into his overalls and walked away.

4.

Everything happened in the mess halls—movies, dances, talent shows, even the Miss

Minidoka beauty contest. Christmas was the biggest deal. Madam Nakatani and her

Japanese dance students performed all over camp, and so did Bobby, Mimi, and I. Bobby

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played “Lady of Spain” and “Beer Barrel Polka” on the accordion and did magic tricks.

Mimi back-flipped to “Stars and Stripes Forever,” jumped in the air twirling a baton, and

landed in splits. I sang and tap-danced to “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and “Santa Claus

Is Coming to Town.” Madam Nakatani was our piano accompanist.

She and Mama hadn’t seen each other since she kicked Mama out of Japanese

dance class. All the other mothers—and old Mr. Sawatari, who brought his twin

granddaughters—always watched silently from the sideline. But Mama wriggled in her

squeaky wooden chair, moving to the music and whispering directions. Stop scrunching

your neck. Follow your movements with your eyes. Shorten your stride, glide along the

floor. Her whispers got louder.

On the day that turned out to be Mama’s last day, Madam Nakatani whirled around.

The flutist stopped in the middle of a note, and sounded as if she had run out of air. The

koto player always played with her eyes shut like she was in a trance, but she opened them

when she heard the flutist’s sour note. Mama stopped talking when she saw Madam

Nakatani gliding like an angry swan toward the row of wooden chairs. Mr. Sawatari and

the mothers stood, and without a word from Madam, filed out. Mama stood to go too, but

Madam barked, “Matte”—wait. Mama sat down like a deflated balloon, then inflated again

and crossed her legs. The musicians led us out of the studio into the hall. The mothers

were crowded behind the double doors. I squeezed between them and pressed my face

against a vertical glass panel. Mama was standing now and yelling at Madam Nakatani,

who was yelling back. When the doors opened, Mama walked out and the other mothers

parted. Her high heels clattered down the wooden stairs. Everybody went back to the

studio. The koto player and the flutist took their places on the stage; I took my place in the

line of girls. Mama spent the rest of the class smoking cigarettes and reading Vogue in the

noodle shop downstairs. Midori had to take me to odori after that.

When Mama and I walked into the mess hall, Madam Nakatani was folding the

kimonos she had brought to camp. Mama turned to Mimi’s mother and said how un-

American Japanese dancing was. Madam whirled around like she’d done that day in class

and said Japanese dancing was fine with Mama until her little girl wasn’t included in

Madam’s camp shows. Then Mama called Madam a liar, and Madam called Mama stuck

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up and something I didn’t understand, and it went on like that. Madam called Mama

something or other, and Mama called her something else, and it was back and forth, in loud

Nihongo.

“Ladies, ladies.” Mr. Matsumoto stood in the wide open doorway with the bright

glare of snow behind him. He took off his dark green sunglasses and sat them on top of his

dark, wavy hair. Mr. Matsumoto was from California and our entertainment director.

“How you doin’ sweetheart?” he said, and everybody thought he was talking to

them. He gave Madam Nakatani a big book of piano music, bent down on one knee and

talked quietly to Mimi Sakata and her mother, and steered Mama and me into the kitchen,

all at once, it felt like.

“Mrs. O- . . . mori-san . . . sumimasen”—begging your pardon—“can I call you

Yukiko? That means snow, doesn’t it? Shall we have some ocha?”

Mama said drinking tea wouldn’t help.

“How about some coffee, then?” Mr. Matsumoto picked up a mug and put it under

the spout of the aluminum container.

In the mess hall, Madam was playing the intro to Mimi’s solo. “That’s good!” Mr.

Matsumoto shouted out the door. “Keep going!”

Mr. Matsumoto had acted in the Charlie Chan movies. He did impressions of

movie stars and called everyone “Honey” and “Sweetheart” and said “Break a leg” before

every performance. He told Mama that he’d played a Chinese houseboy in a Shirley

Temple movie and that he danced the tango with Anna May Wong. He said I had a lot of

talent and Mama had a lot of style. He said these days it’s important to be both East and

West, that the show must go on, that we must absolutely have a piano player. He called

Mama a trouper, and I wondered if that was a kind of soldier.

On Christmas Eve, Tommy Ono and the bad boys followed me to three mess halls shows.

At Block 41, he said, “You’re going to get it.” At Block 42, he dragged his thumb across

his throat. At Block 43, he and the bad boys all dragged their thumbs across their throats. I

knew Block 44 was where I was going to get it. When we pulled up behind the mess hall, I

sat in the back of the army truck.

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“I don’t feel good,” I said.

“Be a trouper,” Mr. Matsumoto said.

“What’s that?” I said.

“The show must go on,” he said, and swung me off the truck.

Mama was waiting in the kitchen with her curling iron.

“I’m tired, I don’t feel good, I have a stomachache,” I said.

“Gaman.” She pursed her lips.

Mr. Matsumoto rushed in. “Places, places. It’s your cue, Shirley.” A straw hat

was angled on his head, a black cane tucked under his arm. He was Fred Astaire that night.

Mama stuck a pink bow in my hair. My ringlets were unraveling.

“Gaman . . . ”

I know, I know. Buck up. Fortitude. Forbearance.

I stood in the wings. Tommy Ono and the bad boys sat on the edge of the stage,

swinging their legs. They hopped off when Mr. Matsumoto walked out and poked their

backs with his cane.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Matsumoto began. “Seattle’s Tiny Sensation. The

Sweetheart of Block 44. The Shirley Temple of Camp Minidoka. Shirley—Temple—

Omori!

The curtain opened. Mama called out from the wings. Smile. Spread out your

skirt. Look peppy. At the upright piano below the stage, Madam Nakatani began the

introduction to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Tommy and the bad boys stood in front,

legs apart, hands in pockets.

Someone shouted, “Sit down!” Tommy plopped on the floor, crossed his legs,

folded his arms across his chest, and glared up at me.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Madam Nakatani played the intro again.

I stood, a tree stump, a log. Madam Nakatani stopped, rose from the piano bench, her

hands still on the keys. “Naa-ni?” she hollered. “Wha-aat?”

Someone in the audience tittered. A girl in front said, “stage fright. Her friend

nodded; both girls snickered. I wanted to run, but my shoes were glued to the floor. At

last, I found the strength to move one foot, then the other. I had to get off—I moved

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backward—one step at a time, my tap shoes jangling. Toe-heel, toe-heel. The audience

began to laugh. I kept smiling and jangling backwards.

When I reached the curtain, something was in the small of my back. It was a hand.

At the end of the hand was my mother, moving me forward, as slowly and deliberately as I

had inched back. Tommy and the bad boys were in front, glaring. My mother was at my

back, bathed in Evening in Paris perfume.

“Shuu-leeee,” she murmured, crouching low. Did she think she was invisible?

We inched forward. Heel-toe, heel-toe. The audience roared, but we pressed on.

When we reached center stage, the audience burst into applause.

Suddenly Mama realized she was standing in the middle of the stage. She sank to

her knees. I spread out my skirt, trying to cover her. Madame Nakatani played the

introduction a third time, a long arpeggio.

Someone in the audience shouted, “Quiet!” Let the kid sing.”

Someone said, “Go on, Shirley.”

A chant began: “Shur-lee. Shur-lee.”

My mother scampered offstage to cheers and applause. Then lots of shushes.

Madam Nakatani raised her bony fingers over the keyboard and we made eye contact.

When her hands came down, I began:

“You better watch out/ You better not cry. . . .”

Everything worked after that! I forgot Tommy Ono and the bad boys, I forgot my

mother and her “Shuu-leeee.” I tap danced and sang to “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” To

“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” “Motto, motto!” the audience shouted. More, more. I

sang “Silent Night” and “God Bless America.” Everybody joined in.

When I came offstage, Mr. Matsumoto said, “Sweetheart, you’re a hit. We couldn’t

have gotten you off without a hook!” I didn’t know what that meant.

At the curtain call, Tommy Ono came to the edge of the stage, hands sunk in his

pockets. He looked up and, in a voice so soft I could barely hear, said “Real good,

Shirley.” He smiled a smile that was not a smirk, then turned and walked away. The bad

boys followed him, hands in pockets, and went to stand in the cake line.

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Chairs, tables and benches were pushed to the sides, coffee grounds sprinkled

across the floor, and the lights turned low. Records were stacked on the Victrola—Glen

Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Andrew Sisters. “In the Mood” blared out of the

loudspeakers.

I had my cake. No Neapolitan ice cream. No Daddy. But the yellow cake with red

and green frosting was good, and Mama gave me her piece too. We watched the grownups

foxtrot and the teenagers jitterbug. Mama moved her feet in place to the music.

“Like to dance?” asked Mr. Matsumoto.

“Oh . . . sollee . . . no sank you . . .”

“I’ll take a rain-check, then,” he said cheerfully. Mr. Matsumoto was one person

who spoke English, but I never understood what he was saying.

“Let-su go!” Mama whispered, pinching the skin under my arm.

The sky was a velvety rhinestone curtain, the ground a frozen meringue, stiff peaks

glistening in the dark. The music followed us as we walked toward our barracks—“I’ll Be

Seeing You.” “Stardust.” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me”—

then melted into the night. Was my father singing Christmas carols in prison camp? Was

he reading my letters, the Christmas card I had made? Soon there was only the crunch of

our boots on the frozen ground, the sound of our exhaled breaths.

The barracks was deserted. Mama twisted the bare bulb in the socket, scooped coal

into the potbelly stove. She set a match to a wad of paper and wedged it between the coals.

Taking my pajamas from under my pillow, she warmed them over the stove.

“Nen-nen,” she said. Sleep.

I crawled into my cot. “Merree Kurismasu, my Sachi.” She called me by my

Japanese name. My eyelids were heavy . . . she said always use American names . . .

Shu-ree . . . Shuree Tempu. . . .

I woke sometime in the night. The room was dark and icy; a few coals glowed in

the stove. The searchlight entered, shone white hot, held me in its beam. I squeezed my

eyes shut and saw stars when I opened them. Mama’s cot was empty.

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The searchlight made its way to the other side of the room. Mama stood at the

window, an Army blanket over her shoulders. The light caught the words, “Property of

United States Government,” then made a slow arc out of the barrack.

In the dark, I heard my mother’s voice. Softly, under her breath, she was singing.

Not exactly in English. Not exactly in tune.

Si-rent night Ho-o-ree night All-ru is calm All-u is bu-right . . .

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IV. One Fine Day

Sometimes I dream that I am back in our house on Spruce Street. It is December 7, 1941,

the morning of my sixth birthday, and I am perched on a high stool in the kitchen. Mama

wields her curling iron like a wand, making perfect Shirley Temple ringlets, fat as

sausages. Daddy stomps up the back porch with the package he has hidden in the garage.

It is a Shirley Temple doll in a glass case. The case is as tall as I.

We pile into our DeSoto and drive down Yesler hill to Japan Town. We park in

front of Mr. Noto’s Photo. Jackson Street is quiet because today is Sunday, but the

colored man at Sonny’s Cafe waves to us and I twirl on the sidewalk to show him my

new dress and shoes, and Daddy holds up Shirley Temple in her glass case. The colored

man laughs behind the plate glass window and claps, but there’s no sound because he’s

across the street.

Daddy bumps Shirley Temple’s case as he walks through the doorway of Mr.

Noto’s studio. “Oops!” he says, and we all laugh. Shirley sways slightly but continues to

stand, smiling in her glass case. We wear matching outfits—crinkly white dresses with

black velvet polka dots and patent leather shoes. Mr. Noto has opened his studio on this

Sunday for us, and his round face gleams with delight. He poses Mama on an ivory-

colored chair that’s high-backed and looks like a throne. She wears her pink flannel

jacket and the mink hat that makes her look like Joan Crawford. Daddy stands behind

her, his hand placed lightly on her shoulder. He is handsome in his tweed suit. I sit on a

footstool, in front of Mama’s alligator shoes and her delicately crossed ankles. Shirley

Temple, who has been taken out of her case, stands next to her.

“Smile,” says Mr. Noto, and ducks his head under the black curtain of his camera.

“Hoold . . . it,” he says and takes our picture—Daddy, Mama, Shirley and me.

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When we return to Spruce Street, Daddy places Shirley Temple in the dining

room with the Japanese dolls in their glass and lacquer cases. Daddy’s golf trophies

shine from many shelves.

We call for Midori, who is watering the jade plant in the living room. She,

Mama, and Daddy stand in the doorway of the dining room, beaming at our family of

dolls and trophies. Daddy’s arm encircles Mama’s waist. I sit at the dining room table

and look up at Shirley. She bends toward me, her arms slightly lifted, her smile

benevolent.

Midori roller skates across the living room and dusts the furniture with a soft,

white shammy. Daddy swings his driver, hitting the ball into Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka’s

garden, where they plant the golf balls that will grow into glorious trees with snowy,

white blossoms. Reverend and Mrs. Koyano are coming up the walk. “Doggie!

Doggie!” they call, and Dougie skips out of the shadows holding my teddy bear. Mrs.

Koyano’s smile beams.

Madam Nakatani rings the doorbell. She is dressed in a purple kimono, a golden

obi around her waist. Madam Nakatani compliments Mama on her red silk dress.

Eleanor Koyano introduces her boyfriend, a soldier with hair the color of wheat; they sit

on the window seat, looking into each other’s eyes. Archie and Grace dance cheek to

cheek, swaying to “I’ll See You in My Dreams” which plays on the Victrola.. A

thousand origami cranes hang from the chandelier. Across the way, in the Tanakas’

garden, Madam Nakatani plays the koto. A Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Madam

Butterfly floats through the neighborhood.

Daddy sits in his armchair, his hands clasped across his chest, his eyes closed. Un

bel dì. One fine day. Vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo. We’ll see a thread of smoke rise at

the distant edge of the sea.

Evening softly falls. Everyone joins hands and dances around the dining room.

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GRACE IN THE MORNING

1. September, 1943

Grace lay perfectly still, defined by sand. Trillions of silent particles, gritty and

glimmering, borne by hot night winds across the lava lands.

In her second autumn in Minidoka she’d grown used to the winds, to life in the

long barracks. Lately, there’d even been stabs at normalcy. Baseball fields and

grandstands, a swimming hole, an assembly center. And Victory gardens. The makeshift

curtains and Army blankets that had partitioned the barracks into family “apartments”

had been taken down. Never mind that the sheets of plywood that had replaced them

failed to reach the ceiling or that the interminable sounds of living continued to buzz

through the building. The illusion of privacy made it so.

This morning was silent except for Archie’s breathing and the toss of his body on

the iron cot. The muffled voices, the opening and shutting of doors, the tread of boots on

the steps were gone. So was the roar of engines the sounds of men climbing aboard

Army trucks.

The convoy had wound its way past the guard house and over the deserted, dusty

roads towards the fields. The inmates of Minidoka camp would save the sugar beet crop

while the farmers of south-central Idaho fought overseas.

Archie, a block captain, had stayed behind. He was thirty-six, an American-born

Nisei. His best friend Tomio, a generation older, and Archi’s tubercular father had been

sent to a segregated enemy alien camp.

Grace lay on the next cot, outlined in sand, trying not to disturb her perfect peace.

Her eyes drifted to the ceiling. She knew that the roof under which she slept had been

dismantled from Army bases in Kansas, or South Dakota, or Georgia, and shipped to

Idaho. She wondered what soldiers, in what states, had slept under the same roof, had

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returned from basic training to drop, exhausted, into their cots. Were they homesick?

Did they cry out in the night? Did they lie as still as she?

The barracks that Grace and Archie had lived in at the Washington State

Fairgrounds were hastily constructed out of green wood. Soaked by spring rains and

baked in summer heat, the boards began to shrink, the cracks between them widen.

Every day Grace found a spider or grasshopper, sometimes a mouse or a scorpion, in the

barracks. Once, a snake engorged with the rodent it had just swallowed.

By summer’s end, she could press her face to the boards and see the hop fields

beyond the barbed wire fence. But here in Minidoka, the desert sands were the color and

texture of granulated sugar and sifted silently through the tiniest cracks.

The sands cover us in the stealth of night, she thought. They tiptoe in, like a

mother who spreads a blanket over her sleeping children.

She knew the sun was stealing its way into the Magic Valley. The rooster knew

too. She mouthed the words. Cock-a-doodle-doo. She formed each syllable silently—

cock-a-doo-dle-doo—and pictured the bird in his coop, stretching his throat to the sun.

Mr. Rooster, cock-of-the walk, strutting among the plump, clucking hens. She was, on

the other hand, a gray-brown pullet, earth-toned and dull. Invisible, actually, outlined by

light and fleeting sand.

The clock, wound tight, ticked madly. The cock. The clock. Archie shifting in

the next cot. Sand dotted his dark hair, gathered in the folds of his pajamas. He’s all

bulk, she thought. He has no edge. He’s tossed and turned and smudged his outline. But

she, arms stiff at her sides, made the perfect bony corpse, laid out and waiting—for what?

She drummed on the mattress, fingering parts of the Chopin nocturne she’d played on the

mess hall piano the night before. She hummed the melody under her breath. A musical

corpse. The idea made her smile. She wondered if her teeth glowed in the barracks’

frigid dark.

Archie turned toward her with a loud snort, a fat open-mouthed carp, a mustache

of sand above his lip. She knew that the key at the back of the clock was slowly

unwinding, just as the sands of the desert were imperceptibly shifting; she knew that

nothing would stop the ticking off of time or the movement of the sands, or the fact that

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when Archie woke he would shatter her morgue-like peace. She lay on her thin mattress

and waited, listening to the clock’s loud accounting of time, waiting for the cessation of

blessed inactivity. Soon, soon, she knew, Archie will jump out of bed and stomp around

the barracks. He will spit sand—on the sheets, on the floor—he will curse between spits,

leave barefoot tracks across the sandy floor, charge the morning like an angry bull. He

will change the molecules in the room.

2.

Archie liked to bathe late at night, soaking in near-scalding water until he emerged, as

pink and tender as a country ham. It was a holdover from his childhood, when everyone

in the lumber camp bathed on Saturday night, the men soaping themselves on the wooden

platform under the pines, pouring pails of warm rinse water over each other, then soaking

in the giant, steaming, communal bath. They looked, joked a Mexican logger who

worked alongside them, like missionaries simmering in a cannibal stew. Min Noguchi,

Archie’s father, had laughed and slapped the Mexican on the back. That’s the Japanese

way, he had said in his broken English. Hakujin, they bathe in their own dirt—you call

that clean?—and he and his friend had laughed, the Mexican’s silver fillings glinting in

his mouth. Come on, come on, Archie’s father had coaxed, and the Mexican stripped

down and took his first ofuro.

After the men soaked sore muscles and drank from jugs of homemade rice wine,

the women added firewood to the stove and soaped and massaged and scrubbed each

other on the outdoor platform. By the time the children took their turns, the fire had died

down, the rinse water was gone, and soap scum floated on the surface of the water.

Archie had never forgotten his wish to be first in the ofuro. The convenience of

indoor plumbing had never made up for the sharp scent of evergreens, the smoky smell of

pinewood and charcoal, the mixture of sounds from the camp and the forest, the freedom

of night and air and sky. The other children dutifully dunked themselves after their

mothers scrubbed their squirming bodies, then ran back to camp for the remaining

moments of play before bed. But Archie would float alone in the dark, stretched out

under the stars, and listen to the velvety hoot of an owl or the laugh-like cry of a loon—

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insect sounds and animal sounds melding with the calls of mothers bringing in their

children, the wine-soaked voices of the men, and sometimes the sound of a squeeze-box

or harmonica.

3. December 7, 1941

Late that night, Archie slid under the covers next to Grace, his ruddy body warming hers.

He had been in the bath an hour and she had fallen asleep. But he rolled over her and she

awoke, her small bones taking the sprawl of his flesh, and he entered her, hardening, then

moistening, then softening inside her.

Afterwards, she lay corpse-like, staring into the dark. She’d wanted to talk about

that morning, about the radio broadcast, about the day’s proceedings—this strange

Sunday that seemed to have happened so long ago and that never seemed to end.

She had risen early to wrap the box of origami paper for Sachi’s birthday. Archie

would bring the rock cod he and Tomio had caught in the Sound the day before. Grace

would have to help the women in the kitchen. Archie nagged as he dressed. Make

yourself useful. Stop being a mouse. You don’t have to play with the kid and the

babysitter, for crying out loud. Sit on the sofa with the grownups; stop creeping around

corners. Say something, for God’s sake. Are you deaf? She nodded. He stood over her,

his belt halfway in his trouser loops. No, I mean, I’m not deaf, I’m listening, she said.

Jesus, Archie said.

Grace loved the little girl Sachi, who was turning six. Her mother wanted

everyone to call the child Shirley, but Grace could never remember. Cock-eyed, Archie

said. Naming the kid after Shirley Temple. Can she even pronounce it? Shulee

Temperu—Jesus. Archie said Yukiko Omori was nuts, but her husband, who was years

older than Archie, was his best friend. Yuki treated Grace as if she was invisible.

Hana Koyano called Yuki “Movie Star” behind her back. She accused Yuki of

showing off, of not knowing her place, of trying to be hakujin. At the same time, Hanna

bragged that her husband was assistant pastor to the Caucasian Reverend Andrews, and

that she had named her own daughter after President Roosevelt’s wife and her son after a

general for whom her father had once been a houseboy. Archie made fun of the way the

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Koyanos pronounced “Dougie.” He imitated their calling their son—“Dawg-gie, Dawg-

gie”—followed by a medley of shrill barks.

People talked in front of Grace as if they were talking to themselves or hearing

themselves think, as if she was furniture or wallpaper or the pet canary in its cage.

Archie and his blasphemies disguised in American humor. Hana Koyano, who used the

nuances of the Japanese language to insinuate, insult, and belittle. The Japanese dance

teacher, Madam Nakatani, who could wither opposition with a single look. Grace heard

them and observed everything.

She quivered whenever Yuki challenged Archie—how could Yuki ever best him,

his command of English, his sovereign male superiority, his Americanism? Her insides

shrank whenever Hana Koyano manipulated Yuki, leaving Yuki puzzled and angry. She

felt ill when Yuki vented her feuds with Madam Nakatani to Sachi, or Midori, or to empty

air, or when Yuki ridiculed the country ways of the kindly neighbor, Mrs. Tanaka.

Grace thought about the nail that sticks up that the Japanese say must be pounded

down. Yuki never gave up talking big, never knew her place, never saw the hammer

descending. Grace was so accepted as to be invisible, yet she felt a strange kinship with

Yuki she could not express. Perhaps it was Yuki’s inappropriateness that fascinated Grace,

the constant striving for something unreachable, the inability to be anything but Yuki.

Grace remembered the scorpion that climbs on the back of the frog to cross a

pond. “Promise you won’t sting me?” asks the frog, and the scorpion agrees. When she

stings him after all, the frog asks, “But why? Now we’ll both drown.” And the scorpion,

drowning, replies, “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.” What was it in Yuki’s nature,

Grace wondered, to make her so Japanese and at the same time not-Japanese; to primp

and preen like Joan Crawford one minute and withdraw like Greta Garbo another; to

acculturate her daughter to the Japanese arts and at the same time teach her songs and

dances out of Hollywood movies? To have everything in a house and husband and child

Grace could ever hope for and yet seem so restless, so searching, so out of place? Yuki

was the nail. Yuki was the scorpion. Grace yearned to know how she could stand it.

Madam Nakatani had banished Yuki from her studio for coaching Sachi from the

sidelines during class; thereafter Midori or Grace brought the little girl to her dance

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lessons. Madam said Grace was rare, a Nisei girl who was still Japanese. When

Madam’s attention turned to her, Grace felt she had somehow been appropriated. Was

she a poor substitute for a rebellious daughter? Madam’s youngest daughter had been

beautiful and brilliant, a Japanese jewel, an ojosan. It was rumored that Madam had

promised her to an elderly industrialist in Kyoto who had financed Madam’s dance

schools in America, and that the girl had eloped with a boy from the forbidden Eta caste,

people who worked at the “unclean” professions: slaughterhouse workers and butchers,

shoemakers and leather tanners, and, like the young man, drum makers. A real Romeo

and Juliet, thought Grace, who had loved Shakespeare in high school.

One evening after giving Grace a koto lesson, Madam had walked to the piano in

her studio and played some haunting melodies that reminded Grace of Ravel and

Debussy. The studio was dark, except for the neon glow of the China Pheasant restaurant

across the street. Grace sat on the edge of the stage, her hands clasped in her lap, eyes

closed, feeling the vibrations of the concert grand enter her body. Jazz preludes, Madam

said when she finished. Grace opened her eyes, feeling enchanted. The restaurant lights

flashed green and gold across Madam’s face as she told Grace that her friend George

Gershwin had died. They had studied music together in Paris said Madam. The Western

Union telegram lay open on the piano bench. Grace remembered that it was the second

week of July 1937, because earlier that week she’d had her first miscarriage.

Madam Nakatani. Hana Koyano. Yuki. Archie. She was overwhelmed by their

loudness, their largeness. Warriors who ripped at her peace. She was of the blessed

weak—like little Sachi, like her moon-faced babysitter, Midori. Tomio too was a gentle

prisoner of strife, she thought. She knew that his mother had disapproved of Yuki, that

he had broken with his samurai family, that he had never looked back. What were the

qualities in Yuki that had captivated Tomio? Grace knew that many families had aspired

to marry their daughters to him. Yet, he had remained a bachelor until he was past forty.

Shock ran through the community when he returned from his visit to Tokyo with a

twenty-four-year-old bride.

He was the kindest man Grace had never known. Trusted by Issei and Nisei,

respected for his class and education, loved for himself. Uncomplaining, peace-making,

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his daughter’s hero, Archie’s best friend, a father and brother. The only criticism ever

heard of him was that he saw his wife through rose-colored glasses.

Archie called Yuki a phony—with her gaman and giri and that Japanese crap

about high class. The copycat movie star clothes, the big hats, the alligator shoes, the

matching handbag with a claw for a clasp. Yuki called Archie fat, vulgar, a show-off.

To Grace, they were both children—demanding the improbable, reaching for

empty sky. She, the resigned pragmatist, felt tender pity for them. Did Tomio feel it too?

Grace worried most about Sachi. How was it possible to make a child both Japanese and

American? A Shirley and a Sachi? Not possible, Grace feared. And yet . . .

When they arrived at the Omori house, Yuki had complained that they were late. Archie

hadn’t been there to distract Hana from making Yuki agree to attend church that morning.

Yuki had spread a net of words—preparations for Sachi’s birthday dinner, guests coming,

and so on and so on—but Hana’s chirping voice had spread a wider net—only an hour,

the Reverend has prepared a sermon on Japanese-American friendship, and so on and so

on. Tomio, when asked if he would attend, quietly said, ie. No.

Yuki was wearing a bright red dress that Grace complimented. It’s not for

church, she said. Grace felt diminished but didn’t know why.

Midori pulled Grace into the dining room. Sachi followed. Midori imitated

Hana: “You gonna wear zat kinda duress to chuurch, Yukiko? So buu-right. The three

of them giggled conspiratorially.

“Your mom looked just like a movie star, huh, Sachi? said Midori.

Grace saw that new Japanese dolls had been added to the dining room. Chalk-

faced, black-haired, kimono-clad. Vitreous eyes set in lifeless faces. Overlooking the

assemblage of tiny glass cases from an alcove that Hana Koyano called “the shrine,” stood

the thirty-six-inch Shirley Temple doll on its pedestal. Yuki had made matching birthday

outfits for her daughter and the doll. Archie said the dolls gave him the creeps—reminded

him of trophies of great white hunters—and she had to agree.

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In the living room, Tomio had tuned the radio to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast.

Archie joked about Tomio’s high-tone ways and changed the station. Glen Miller’s In the

Mood filled the room. “Let’s cut a rug!” Archie said and twirled Eleanor Koyano, in her

angora sweater and pleated skirt, under his arm. Yuki returned in a high-necked navy blue

dress.

We interrupt this program. The announcer’s voice masked a slight hysteria.

What is Paru Haba? Yuki had said. It had sounded singsong to Grace, like the title

of one of Yuki’s Hit Parade songs. What is Paru Haba? . . . da da dum . . . Grace couldn’t

get it out of her mind. Popular tunes buzzed in her head. She saw the Andrew Sisters, their

piled-up hair-dos and swaying padded shoulders. What is Paru Haba? Rum and Coca-

cola . . .

Archie had said Pearl Harbor was in the Philippines. Grace had offered a

correction. Didn’t he, the announcer, say naval base in Honolulu? She had said it in the

smallest of voices, but he whirled around—angry as he often was—at her, only her. “So

what?” he said. She realized, then, that he despised her.

She had promised to teach Sachi origami, to fold colorful squares of paper into

small objects—cranes and flowers and round balls puffed up with one’s breath. But

Archie had pulled her away after the radio announcement. She felt sorry for the little

girl—all she wanted was for everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” and to blow out the

candles on her Shirley Temple cake—but they, except for Tomio and the younger

children, had left for church, where Reverend Koyano had discarded his sermon on

Japanese-American friendship and spoke from the pulpit about patriotism. Archie and

the others—Nisei men worried about their fathers and grandfathers who hadn’t the

protection of citizenship—had met afterward in the Sunday School basement, where they

sat on small chairs and made notes at low, bright blue and yellow tables, surrounded by

pictures of Jesus. Suffer the little children unto me.

Archie’s father had come to America on a labor contract and had never returned

to his village. Peaches and grapes in the Central Valley, lettuce and artichokes in Salinas,

apples and pears in Eastern Washington, cranberries, oysters, and timber near Willapa

Bay, asparagus and railroad work in Montana had become his life. Minoru Noguchi had

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bragged he’d return home a rich man, but he had lost track of time. Suddenly no one was

left in the place he had once called home. He had never become a rich American, not

even, because of the Asian Exclusion Act, an American. The old man was frail now, his

lungs scarred by TB, and he looked shrunken next to his son’s robust, five-foot-nine

frame. He’d joined the Communist party when he was young, at a work camp in Fresno,

and even though he hadn’t paid his dues for a decade, he still sent letters in his

unschooled script, protesting unfair labor practices to the Japanese language section of

the North American Post.

Grace and Archie had gone to the old man's boarding house on Yesler Hill after

the church meeting, brought him food Yuki Omori had pressed on them from the

interrupted party. He had gummed the sushi gratefully, his weepy eyes shining. Archie

was always gentle with his father. At times like these Grace felt great love for her

husband. She liked the old man and liked seeing them together—Archie peeling a

tangerine with his beefy fingers and placing it, section by section, between his father’s

trembling lips; the son’s pleasure at the father’s appetite; the soft-spoken attentiveness

with which he conversed in broken Japanese with the old man; the thoughtful nods and

bows that made the usually aggressive Archie seem shy and hesitant.

All day, Grace had wanted to say something to Archie, to tell him—what?—she

wasn’t sure. She’d wanted to talk, to make conversation with her husband. Maybe it was

to talk about the things he talked about with others—about Reverend Koyano’s sermon

on patriotism, about the events of the day and what it meant that Japan had attacked

America. Instead, he had left her with the other women in the church kitchen while the

men discussed their uncertain futures. She wanted to ask him questions. Why he had to

show off in front of people; why he was impatient and rude; why he had to join every

committee, attend every meeting, work himself into exhaustion. Why he had “cut a rug”

with young Eleanor. Why he hadn’t jitterbugged with her.

She knew he would be angry and tired when they returned to their apartment, that

he would sag like a punctured balloon when they were alone. It’s all right, Archie dear,

she wanted to say. I’m your wife, your Gracie. You’re a little man and you’re scared.

Tell me what you feel, so I can love you. She wanted to shout, to smack his face and

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pound her fists into his chest, to smash through the stone-cold wall of their life until he

could see her, hear her, feel her. She wanted him to make her real.

They had driven home in silence. He ran up the stairs two at a time, unlocked the

front door, flung it open, and dropped his coat over the living room sofa. He yanked off

his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and strode into the bedroom. Grace had shut the front door

behind her and picked up the trail of Archie’s clothes, shoes, and socks that led to the

bathroom. She heard the water rushing into the tub behind the half-closed door, and she

sat on the bed and waited. She fell asleep and woke to Archie’s sodden breath on her

face and his collapse inside her. Just as suddenly, he was asleep and she lay awake in the

dark, listening to the ambient sounds of the night.

The next morning, Archie awoke slowly to waves of coffee aroma. He’d taught Grace to

make coffee cowboy style the way his father had shown him in the logging camp days.

He lay in bed, following the sounds of his wife’s movements as she walked across the

kitchen floor, opened and shut cupboards, slid open and closed drawers. He listened to

the chime of silver and glassware, the thud of the icebox door as it closed and the click of

the latch that fastened it, then the cracking of shells—one, two, three—and the sizzle of

bacon and eggs.

Grace would have started all this after turning off the alarm on its first ring. She

would have slipped silently out of bed, bare feet softly scuttling along the hardwood

floor, and into the hall bathroom where she washed her face, brushed her teeth—mouth

rinsed with faucet water cupped in her palm and spit out with barely a sound—and

brushed and pinned up her waist-length hair into a tiny, tight bun.

She had returned to the bedroom where her husband slept face down in his pillow,

one wide foot angling out from the covers. She carefully slid open the dresser drawers,

removing a rayon slip and her garter belt from one, a pair of flesh-colored cotton hose

from another, and she dressed quickly in the closet. She knew Archie didn’t like to see

women around the house in robes and housecoats, their hair in rollers, or without a slash

of color on their lips—but not too much, not enough to look “sluttish.” She knew that he

liked his bacon crisp, his eggs sunny-side up, that he couldn’t abide runny yolks. She

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would gently remind him when it was eight fifteen, and he would rise, walk groggily into

the bathroom, then sit at the kitchen table and read the Post-Intelligencer until he finished

dressing and walked out the door.

They’d been married eight years earlier in the new chapel of the Japanese

American Methodist Church by Reverend Koyano and had honeymooned in Hood River,

Oregon, with the great-aunt who’d raised Archie when his father was sent to a TB

sanitarium. She had been too senile to attend the wedding. Grace had spent the first

weeks of her marriage caring for a woman without memory, the only mother Archie had

ever known.

What a good Japanese wife, said the aunt’s neighbors, not like so many Nisei girls

these days. More like the ones back home, obedient and quiet. This generation, so noisy

and spoiled with their smoking and their bright nail polish. She’s very plain, of course,

and looks like the wind could blow her away. Who is she anyway? What are her

parents? Dead, huh? She’s lucky to be getting married at all then, don’t you agree? No

looks, no family. That type usually ends up old maids. She’ll age fast, though, with that

skinny body and glum face. Of course, he’s no prize either—look at that fat belly and

oshiri; he can hardly keep his pants up. But he’s a man, he can get away with it. Big

shot in Seattle, too, we hear, with the Citizens League and all. She’ll be a good daughter-

in-law, an obedient wife. And that poor boy, he won’t have to worry about this one

running away. His mother—so beautiful, ne?—but what a devil, going off with that

hakujin, that salesman with an automobile and a smile.

4.

Grace tried not to move, tried not to disturb the sands that formed the shape and

substance of her. She knew that it was five o’clock and still dark, a sliver of light

creeping over the desert horizon. Archie would have to walk to the showers and rinse the

sand from his body. The showers were four barracks away, at the end of their block, and

the water would be cold. He’d walk in the semi-dark in the robe she had given him for

Christmas 1941, the duffel bag that held his shaving kit, towel, and change of clothes

slung over his shoulder. If he met someone, he would shout a greeting. He was always

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cheerful with others; hale and hearty he was called. Important too, a block captain, an

officer in the Japanese American Citizens League. With the removal of the older

generation community leaders, young Nisei had stepped up.

It was six o’clock in the morning and Grace hadn’t made breakfast for over a

year, hadn’t shared a meal with her husband except with a couple hundred people.

Archie had mess hall duty this morning.

She rose carefully. Archie’s bedding was crumpled, the sand scattered. She

looked at her perfect outline in sand, more real than the Grace who stood in her muslin

nightgown, a line of perspiration trailing between her breasts. It had been a hot night; it

would be another hot day. Who was the real Grace? The pale face in the mirror? The

Grace who swept the barracks floor every morning, who’ll wipe the wet spots of Archie’s

spittle? The Grace who ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the mess hall yesterday, who

ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in the makeshift quarters of the Washington State Fair last

year; who nodded earnestly when spoken to, listening to complaints, suggestions or

requests to pass on to her big-shot husband; who folded a thousand cranes for patients in

the camp hospital; who worked as an aide in the Quaker teacher’s third grade class? Or

was the real Grace the sandy outline on the cot after a windstorm in the Magic Valley, a

Grace that could be dismissed with a flick of the sheet, who would disappear and appear

again depending on the wind?

5.

The night Archie learned of his father’s death in the enemy alien camp in New Mexico,

he walked into the desert alone with the mayonnaise jar of homemade sake Mr. Tanaka

had brought to him. Ichiro Tanaka was from the same prefecture as Archie’s father and

had worked with him as a railroad gandy dancer and in migrant worker camps. But he

had volunteered for World War I and had been granted American citizenship. Unlike

other Issei—Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, journalists, teachers

and translators of the Japanese Language School, lawyers and businessmen, fishing boat

captains, George the milkman, the brothers who owned the fish market, the blind man

who repaired cane chairs, or Midori’s father and Reverend Koyano—he had not been

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swept up by the F.B.I. in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he

fermented the rice his wife brought from the mess hall to encourage him to eat and made

jar aftger jar of mind-numbing sake.

Archie had been called to the administration office during lunch. Grace saw his

face harden as he stood up from the table. She reached out to take his tray, but his look

made her pull back and he took his uneaten meal to the bussing station. Yuki was sitting

across the table and stretched out her hand to her. Grace ran her fingers across Yuki’s

brightly painted nails. The last of her bottle of “Fatal Apple,” Yuki said, and the two

women laughed. They sat late into the afternoon, drinking cold mess hall coffee. Grace

smoked a Pall Mall cigarette Yuki offered her.

She knew when Archie returned—by the lurch of his boots on the barracks steps,

the squeaking of the door as it slowly opened, by his crumpled, little boy’s face. She had

wanted to comfort him, to lay his head on her breast and stroke his hair. But he had

batted away her hands like a petulant child, and spat out, “Git.”

Tomio’s letter arrived weeks later, “Enemy Alien Mail” stamped on the envelope,

written in Japanese and dated the day of his father’s death. Archie stared blankly at his

friend’s graceful calligraphy, at the sections blanketed with black ink. Why bother to

censor? He couldn’t read a damn word. He crushed the letter between his hands and flung

it against the wall. Later, Grace picked up the wrinkled white ball and flattened it with her

hand. She would save it for when Archie could bear to hear Tomio’s words translated. She

had watched her husband in silence, knowing better than to say anything, to annoy him into

a tirade. She sat alone on the edge of her cot, which was gritty with sand.

6. July, 1945

Archie awakens. Grace wears a pink-and-orange robe with kimono-like sleeves. She’s

let down her hair, still rippled from braiding, and it cascades past her shoulders. The

large aluminum tub they’ve carried from the laundry room takes up most of the floor

space. A bucket of water bubbles on the potbelly stove. Grace opens the door to the

stove and tosses in more lumps of coal. She ladles hot water into the aluminum tub from

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the bucket and lifts its handle. Archie leaps to his feet and takes the bucket off the stove.

He pours the water into the tub, breathing in the sweet smell of steam. They had each

carried two more buckets of cold water from the bathhouse, walking together in

comfortable silence. The buckets line the floor, waiting to be heated. She nods her

thanks as Archie lifts one to the stove.

Dozo. Her lips move silently as she extends her hand toward the tub. Archie

bows slightly and she’s pleased by the formality.

Archie unbuttons his flannel pajama top. He pulls the drawstrings of the bottoms

and turns his back to her as he steps out of them. He is as shy as a bridegroom, as shy as

Grace felt on their wedding night, as embarrassed as when she felt she had disappointed

him. He folds his pajamas and places them under the pillow on his cot. She stands next

to the steaming tub, eyes downcast, fingers intertwined to make a cradle. They are

playing out a silent charade, without anger, without impatience or doubt. It is the first

time they have been in such unison—of needs, gestures, even of breath.

Archie steps naked into the tub. His skin prickles at the heat and his shoulders

give a tiny shake, an involuntary jiggle. He lets out a loud sigh and Grace laughs. Her

laughter chimes, like a child’s, Archie thinks, completely natural and unpremeditated—

why hadn’t he heard it before? Grace ladles warm water over his head, rubs his scalp.

He closes his eyes and sighs softly.

Across the barracks, Yuki calls for her daughter. Shuu-leee. Shuu-leee.

The Issei and their movie star names, Archie thinks. The damned “r’s.” Why do

they keep naming their kids “Clark” and “Cary” and “Marlene” and “Gloria”? His dad

never could say “Archie.” That’d been his mother’s cocklemanie idea—Archie the

cockroach and Mehitabel the glamorous cat. His semi-illiterate, peasant father and the

girl from Hiroshima he’d found in a Barbary Coast whorehouse. He’d loved her but

couldn’t keep her, not his dad, not baby Archie. No Japanese middle name, his mother

had insisted. Had she looked back when she drove off with the Irish salesman?

Grace rubs a bar of Lifebuoy over a washcloth. She is unhurried, unanxious:

they are perfectly in tune, in the silence of their barrack, in their last time together. He

fills the tub with his bulk. Water puddles to the floor. He opens his legs and leans

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forward; his penis floats in the soapy water. Grace scrubs his back. She walks around

and kneels before him. The top of her robe opens, her breasts sway like young pears.

When she soaps his chest, his nipples harden.

She ladles the soapy water from the tub into the empty buckets and rinses him

with fresh, hot water. She holds out a flannel sheet and he enters it. She wraps it around

his bulky frame and does not drop her arms; her head rests on his chest. He pulls the tie

from her robe and they move as one to the cot on which she had lain for a hundred weeks,

unwanted and invisible. He lies back on the bed and she folds her legs around him. He

weeps and they make love. Gracie, he moans. Gracie. The sands on their blanket drift to

the floor.

She will leave him. She will leave the camp, the state of Idaho, and the western United

States. Her brown and tan suitcase is packed and sits against the wall, next to the buckets

of soapy water which will be poured onto the hard ground outside the barracks. An

Army truck will take her to the depot in Boise. She will board a train with Yuki and her

daughter, who will be met in Queens, New York, by their faithful Midori, a grown

woman now and married. There, they will wait for Tomio’s release. Grace will

disembark at the Lafayette Station in Chicago, where she will work for the American

Friends Society.

What will she do? She doesn’t know. Only that they want her and welcome her

and will make room for her in their lives. Room for expansion, room to fill empty

spaces. She sees her reflection in the window pane. Slim-figured, a little stooped. She

must hold up her head. Gaman, Yuki always says. Courage and fortitude for the nails

that stick out. Grace passes her reflection, and she is pleased.

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STICKS AND STONES

No one sees the giant turtle paddle out of Lake Michigan. No one observes its slow

progress across the sands of the Edgewater Beach Hotel or hears the click of claws on the

white-bricked walk. The doorman won’t report until seven, the bell captain dozes in his

lobby alcove.

The turtle follows the grassy curve of the driveway onto the empty lanes of

Sheridan Road. At the corner, the traffic light glowers red, then yellow, then green. The

turtle makes its way down the silent streets, away from the familiar waters of Lake

Michigan, westward toward Foster Avenue. Another hour and the whoosh of traffic will

dominate the morning; by then the turtle will have plodded to its final stop—an alley

behind the 5200 block. There it will rest against the alley wall, under the elevated tracks

of the Chicago Transit System.

Kraut Joey and the O’Malleys find it. Their whoops and hollers are drowned out by the

roar of elevated cars overhead. They collect ammunition from the empty lots along the

alley.

Wally looks down from his porch on the third floor and yearns to join the fun. He

ties his dog Cricket to a post and speeds down the steps. He is eight. Kraut Joey is

eleven years old, the size of an adult. Blondie O’Malley is ten, her brother Jimmy seven,

Baby Penny five. The O’Malleys are spending their last day in the neighborhood. Their

father, Joseph, has found factory work in Gary, Indiana. Their mother, Rose, is helping

her husband load the battered truck parked in front of the apartment building. Wally and

his mother and older sister, Gloria, have arrived in Chicago from an internment camp in

northern California.

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The O’Malleys have gathered broken bricks, rocks, pieces of wood, soda bottles,

tin cans. They lay their booty at Joey’s feet.

“Smash it good,” Blondie says.

“You wanna play? asks Joey.

“I . . . “

“You throw,” Joey tells Wally. “Like so.”

Joey pitches a rock. It lands with a thud on the carapace, bounces off, and hits the

alley wall.

“Gut,” says Joey. He picks up a broken brick and extends it.

Wally’s hand lifts automatically. The brick is heavy, difficult to fit his fingers

around. One foot stands in the alley, the other on the edge of the weedy yard.

Only Joey stands close to the turtle. Blondie and Jimmy fling fiercely from a

distance. Baby Penny stands in front of Mr. Jablonski’s sunflower patch and throws

handfuls of leaves.

A nail protrudes from Joey’s plank. He stands with his feet apart, one arm lifted.

The shell is crazed with a pattern of cracks.

“Where’s the turtle?” Baby Penny asks.

“Hiding,” says Jimmy.

“Anybody home?” Joey shouts into the shell. He works his arm like a lever.

Wally squeezes his eyes shut. In the dark, the shrieks and cheers of the

O’Malleys, the rumble of the el, the echoes of thuds, pings, and bongs blend into a single

sound. Only Joey is efficiently silent. The air is thick with sweat and garbage.

The head is out now, snaking back and forth. The shell leaks a pus-green liquid

that blackens and emits a sickly-sweet odor. Inside the damaged shell, the embryo-like

body flails. Wally is wide awake but frozen.

“He’s gotta hit it too.” Blondie points.

Joey lowers the shiny, wet plank. He walks close to Wally. “You try,” he

whispers. Spittle sprays Wally’s cheek. He cannot move.

“Throw,” says Blondie. “Like this like this like this.”

“Can’t,” Wally says.

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“Cuz he’s a Jap, a sneaky yellow Jap,” shouts Jimmy. “My Dad says so.”

On the porch, Cricket barks, her nose squeezed between the railing slats. Wally

runs, out of the alley, up the back stairs, toward the sound of his dog. When he stumbles

onto the porch, Cricket leaps at him.

Silence on the ground. Wally walks to the railing. Kraut Joey, Blondie, Jimmy,

Baby Penny. The shadow in the corner.

He still clutches the brick. He steps back, raises his arm, and throws with all his

might. At the elevated train rumbling past, at the birds perched on the electrical wire, at

the Sears Roebuck sign in the distance, at the mild, blue sky.

The brick drops into the neighbor’s sunflower patch. His shoulder aches. In the

kitchen, he pours Milk Bones into Cricket’s bowl. He turns on the cold water faucet and

cries into the sink.

In the next room, Gloria is practicing a new piece on the piano. She makes

mistakes, goes over and over the same notes. Wally holds his hands under the water until

they are numb, until he no longer feels them.

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GOOD-BYE GORILLA

1.

You just don’t want to be around so many Nihonjin, I told Mama. We were standing

outside the Japanese American Citizens League. Not so, she said, but she kept her eyes

down and I knew that I was right. Then why can’t we live on the south side?

Yakamashii! Enough. All our friends from camp are here, I told her. Don’t be fresh, she

said. I’m not, I was going to say, but she suddenly looked at me with her X-ray eyes.

Wally, the coward, just stood there holding the list of addresses.

So, after leaving Manzanar, we moved to the north side of Chicago, where there

wouldn’t be so many Japanese to bother Mama.

2.

The Rosebud Apartments were like an old woman trying to hang on to her looks. The

straggly boxwoods along the entrance were still pruned, a hand mower still pushed across

the tiny lawn, litter still picked off the walk. But once we opened the big glass door to

the vestibule, there was no way to save face. Dirt had ground into the chipped marble

steps; a crack ran like a scar across the glass panel of the inner door. The smell of

cabbage and whiskey hung in the dark hall.

Evelyn, the landlady, lived on the first floor. She furnished the linens—

threadbare towels and sheets stamped with faded roses. The pay phone hung on the wall

under the stairwell. A narrow staircase angled up to our third floor apartment.

Ours was the only apartment on the floor—a big room with a double bed and a

kitchen that led to a back porch facing the elevated tracks. The el trains rumbled past the

windows day and night, so close I could look into the cars, so close I thought I could

touch the people in them.

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We’d begged Mama to let us keep the two-year-old Springer Spaniel that the

previous tenants wanted to leave behind. Cricket became our dog for the rest of our

childhood.

Everyone on the floor shared the bathroom, but we were the closest to it. The

room next door was vacant. Down the hall, Mr. Shapiro’s room faced the stairway. Next

to him, the large corner room had a bay window that looked out to the street. The little

girl and her mother who had lived there had gone back to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The

father had lost his leg and was coming home from the war.

One morning, the door to the corner room was open, and I walked over to the bay

window. I could see straight into the rooms across the street—a parlor with heavy, dark

furniture and a canary in a cage; a kitchen with white walls and cupboards, where a lady

in a frilly apron stood over a stove; next door, a curly-haired dog twirled deliriously when

a little boy walked in. The iceman climbed up the side steps in his rubber apron,

balancing a block of ice on his back with giant tongs. A shade was pulled down in a

room on the floor below. A black banner with a gold star hung in the window. Someone

had died in the war.

I sat on the window seat and looked out at Lake Michigan and the Edgewater

Beach Hotel, where Mama worked as a maid. To the right, cars hummed along Foster

Avenue. Grady Elementary stood on the corner. Wally was in the third grade and I was

in the sixth. On the sidewalk under the window, a tiny square of dirt held a tree bent with

blood-red blossoms.

3.

The next day the door to the corner room was open again, and the walls smelled of fresh

paint. Mama, Wally and I peered in. So bright, said Mama, holding her hands over her

eyes. Very clean. We tied Cricket’s leash to the banister and walked in. Wally kicked

off his shoes and slid across the polished floor.

“Hi,” came a voice from a corner. It was our landlady’s boyfriend, and he was

painting the wall a soft lemon color.

“Gomen nasai,” said Mama. Excuse us.

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He was American Japanese. Mits Matsuda from Oregon. “O-hi-o . . . go-zai . . .

ma-su.” He looked so relieved when he pushed out his “How do you do?” that Wally

and I laughed. He bowed solemnly to Mama though, and she bowed back. She didn’t

look happy.

“Where you kids from?” asked Mits.

“Monterey,” I said.

“Manzanar,” said Wally.

“Monterey first,” I said, “but we just got out of Manzanar.”

“Oh yeah?” said Mits. “What was that like?”

Mama looked happier when he said he hadn’t been to camp, he’d been in Chicago

all the time, and that he didn’t know many Nihonjin on the West Coast anymore.

“How come you’re out here?” he asked, and I told him it was because we could

leave camp if we came east. Everybody except for Papa, I thought.

“Is that a cherry tree down there?” I asked.

“Some kind of hawthorn,” said Mits. “Scruffy all year, then goes crazy in spring.”

We looked down at the only tree on the block. The gnarled trunk almost

disappeared under a thick cloud of red.

“Go-ree-ya, Wor-ee,” said Mama. Let the man do his work. Mama couldn’t

pronounce Gloria—it sounded like “gorilla.” Wally was “Woree”—like worry.

Cricket jumped on us when we returned to the hallway. “I like that room,” I said.

“Let’s move in there.” Only one room, Mama said. No stove, no pantry, only a hot plate.

“I’m almost twelve. Can’t I have my own room?” Mama put her hand to her

head, but I kept going. “Wally kicks all night.”

“Do not!” said my brother. “Gloria grinds her teeth!”

Yakamashii! Shut up. Mama rubbed her temples. There was no money for an

extra room; there was no money for anything. The letter from Papa that had come in the

mail lay twisted in her apron pocket. Papa was in a prison camp and Uncle Frank was

coming to Chicago.

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4.

My brother and I were named after old-time movie stars. Wally after Wallace Beery,

who Mama said had a kind face. Me after Gloria Swanson, who had a beauty mark on

her chin.

Uncle Frank wasn’t really our uncle. He was Frank Kamo and Mama’s

boyfriend. In Monterey, he’d worked for Papa at the cannery. Why didn’t Frank go to

prison camp too, I wondered. Not important enough, Mama said. He wasn’t a cannery

manager like Papa, he didn’t own a fishing boat; he wasn’t a leader. The FBI thought

Papa might be a Jap spy.

Uncle Frank had a brown mole shaped like Australia on his left cheek. He was

good-looking and five feet, ten inches tall. The ladies in camp said he was an Oriental

Cary Grant. He was supposed to get married once, Mama said, but the girl died. A lady

in camp was going to leave her husband for him—Mama couldn’t stand her. Uncle Frank

never talked bad about Papa.

What about our Papa? I asked. He’s in New Mexico, Mama said. Prison camp.

Maybe he’ll never get out. Why not? Because he’s Japanese, because his family is

samurai. But he doesn’t know how to sneak a beefsteak into the barrack; he doesn’t

know how to make furniture out of scrap lumber or fix a tarpaper roof so the rain doesn’t

come through. I am all alone with two kids. I need a man that knows how to do things.

How dare you question me? She was shouting now. Where was your Papa when Wally

got sick? Who took him to the infirmary? Who made toys for you and Wally out of

scrap lumber? Who got us out of camp? Frank, it was Frank. Not your Papa. Your

Papa isn’t here.

5.

Mits and our landlady Evelyn drank beer and fought. Evelyn was cheap, Mama said. It’s

too bad a Japanese man takes up with that kind of woman. I wanted to say maybe he’s

that kind of man, but I didn’t. Evelyn’s hair was bright orange with black roots, and the

mascara clumped on her eyelashes. She wore a tiny gold cross on a chain around her

neck. She was a Polack. Mr. and Mrs. Finelli, who lived on the first floor with their

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twins, were Dagos, Mr. Jablonski in the building next door a Bohunk, Mr. Shapiro on our

floor a Hebe and a Kike. We were the Japs on the third floor. I didn’t know what the

Youngbloods on the floor under us were. “When they get old will their blood still be

young?” Wally wanted to know.

Soon after Mits finished the corner room, Evelyn had a new boyfriend. Mama

was relieved. She thought she knew some Matsudas in camp. What if they’re relatives,

she said. What if they visit?

The hawthorn tree stayed in bloom a long time, although its flowers eventually

faded to a dirty pink. The For Rent sign in the bay window came down.

“Krauts,” said Evelyn. “They’re moving into the corner room.”

Joey and his mother hauled four shopping bags and a suitcase tied with rope up

the stairs. Joey spoke a little English, his mother none. He was eleven, tall and wide; his

mother was wider.

When I passed her on the stairs, I had to squeeze against the wall.

“Hello,” I said. “Can I help you?”

Her eyes were like coffee beans stuck into a Pillsbury dough face. I reached for

one of the shopping bags, but she pulled it away and stomped up the stairs. She stopped

on the landing, wheezing, and fanned herself with her dress. She wasn’t wearing

underwear. We called her fat Joey’s mother or the crazy Germany lady. We never knew

her name.

The next day, Uncle Frank came in a Yellow Cab. He wore brown and white

two-tone shoes and tan slacks, a tan jacket over a silky brown shirt, and a dark brown tie

with yellow polka dots. His straw hat slanted over his forehead. Two points of a bright

yellow handkerchief stuck out of his breast pocket. Uncle Frank wasn’t afraid to wear

yellow!

He plunked a stack of boxes on the sidewalk. Chewing gum, Hershey bars, comic

books, and a Roy Rogers watch for Wally. Pearls, lace hankies, a velvet-linked jewelry

box for me. Silk stockings, a nightgown, Evening in Paris perfume for Mama. Hard to

get in wartime. He gave the taxicab driver a five-dollar tip and slung a leather wardrobe

bag over his shoulder. His face smelled of minty aftershave. The dark shape of Australia

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on his left cheek made him look mysterious, like Basil St. John’s eye patch in Brenda

Starr.

Where you been? Mama said. She knew he’d arrived on the Super Chief two

days earlier. A guy from camp who lived on the south side owed him money, he said.

We can double your money, his friend had told him, but the dice ran cold and someone

always had a better poker hand. Frank had to pawn his expensive carpenter tools. Oh no,

Mama moaned. Uncle Frank shrugged his shoulders. He needed a stake to get back in

the game, he said. What about the job he came to Chicago for? How could he work

now? she wanted to know. Mama stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips, her

face beginning to twist.

Uncle Frank took her hands. Listen, he said. And he told her how he’d found

another game—how he made eleven passes in the back of a Chinese restaurant on Clark

Street and how next morning he had a haircut, shave, and shine, took his tools out of

hock, and gone shopping on State Street—Marshall Field, Carson Pirie-Scott, Saks Fifth

Avenue. He twisted the top of the midnight blue Evening in Paris bottle as if it were a

bottle of champagne and held it under her nose. “Baka,” Mama laughed. Idiot.

We ran upstairs with the presents. Mama introduced Uncle Frank to Evelyn.

“My brother,” she said. Evelyn usually just gave new tenants the key, but she took Uncle

Frank up to the third floor and showed him his room. Wally ran in and jumped on the

mattress. Mama stood in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. Come on down for a

beer, Evelyn said. Uncle Frank answered his English wasn’t so good and gave her a box

of chocolates.

Then he moved into our place, and Wally and I slept in the iron bed in Uncle

Frank’s room. It had a wide bureau with a mirror, straight-backed chair, a nightstand

next to the bed, and a sink on the wall with a thin towel on a rack. One closet, no

window. A glass transom over the door. Two light bulbs screwed into the fixture in the

ceiling. You pulled a long cord to turn them on. Uncle Frank made a paper lantern to put

around the bulbs.

“How come we have to say he’s our uncle?” asked Wally. Over and over Mama

had to tell him, “No tell, Wo-ree, no tell.” Why lie? Uncle Frank said. They’ll kick us

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out into the street, Mama said. You exaggerate, he said. I nearly went crazy sneaking

around camp, she said. Get a divorce, he said. You have no shame, she said. Stop

acting, he said.

6.

The first time we heard Joey getting beat up, Mama made me run downstairs with her to

tell Evelyn to call the police. But when Evelyn came to the door, Mama just stared. It

was three o’clock in the afternoon and Evelyn was holding up a bedspread in front of her.

Mama poked a nickel at her and waved at the telephone in the hall. “Poleese, puleeze,

you call poleese.” She pushed me in front and I had to say that Joey’s mother was killing

him.

“Anybody’d wanna kill that kid,” Evelyn said. She started to close the door but

Mama stepped in the way. The bedspread on Evelyn started to sip, and she pressed her

elbows against her sides. A beer bottle rolled out from behind the door and stopped at the

tip of my saddle shoes. Mama glared at the bubbles foaming around my shoes. Evelyn

rolled the bottle back with her bare foot. Then the door widened like the curtain of a

play.

Evelyn’s new boyfriend lay under a rumpled sheet, his head propped on one

elbow, a skinny cigar between his teeth. Smoke rings—Wally would’ve loved them—

hung over him like halos. I knew his name was Hector and that he was in the Merchant

Marines. When he saw me, he put two fingers in a V-sign like Winston Churchill in the

Movie-Tone News. Mama pinched the soft part of my arm. “Ow!” I said, and couldn’t

V back.

Evelyn adjusted her bedspread. “Don’t you worry, Mama-san,” she said. Mama-

san. Our mother’s brown eyes became black and huge, like the whites had burned out.

Wally called them X-ray eyes. He thought Mama could see right through to his thoughts.

“Don’t be a baka,” I said. Lame-brain. Anybody could see through Wally about

anything. He was seven.

That Kraut is loco, said Evelyn, not noticing Mama’s eyes. She twirled her finger

near her head. A social worker had brought Joey and his mom to the Rosebud. In

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Europe, she’d been in an insane asylum, Joey in an orphanage. Her brother had brought

them to America, but he died. Evelyn began to shut the door.

I peered around Mama to look at Hector. As if to beat the closing door, he sat up

and pulled the sheet around his waist. Making fists, he bent his arms and pumped his

biceps into wondrous bulges. Parts of his tattoos—the grass skirt of the hula lady on one

arm and the tail of the dragon on the other—wiggled. The veins in his arms stood out

from under his skin, thick as purple rope.

When Mama and I went upstairs, it was like Evelyn said. Everything was quiet in

the corner room.

It was still quiet when Uncle Frank came home from work, and we went around

whispering, like church. Pray it stays that way, Uncle Frank said. He threw his straw hat

at the coat stand as he walked into the kitchen. The hat twirled madly around the hook

and balanced to a stop. “Wow!” Wally mouthed. Uncle Frank hardly ever missed.

“Cross your fingers,” I said, looking in the direction of the corner room. “Cross your

eyes,” Wally whispered.

Uncle Frank started dinner—spaghetti with butter and catsup, and miniature

meatballs. Wally called them midget-balls. Uncle Frank had won the butter in a poker

game in Chinatown and extra meat rations playing craps.

We had almost made it to dinner when it started. Mutti! Mutti bitte nein! Joey

ran out of the corner room. He crashed through the hall into the bathroom and slammed

the door. Our pantry wall shook. Joey’s mother tore after him, and the floor quaked.

She pounded on the bathroom door, screaming “Yohee! Yohee!” Wally’s toy cars slid

across the floor, and Mama’s rice bowls clattered on the shelves.

Then Mama was screaming too—Dojin! Savages! Kichigai! Crazy!—in

Japanese and broken English. What had she done to have to live like this? What kind of

Buddhist hell was she in? If only she could die. She would put rocks in the sleeves of

her kimono and walk into Lake Michigan. Then we’d be sorry; we’d be orphans and

have to feed her ghost.

“She doesn’t have any kimonos with her,” Wally whispered. I kicked him under

the table. Uncle Frank put the meatballs in the icebox and took out a bottle of beer. He

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turned up the radio and went out on the porch. There are two crazy women living on the

third floor, he said.

“Come on, Cricket,” I said, clipping her leash to her collar. We slipped past

Joey’s mother, who was still banging on the door. Hector was coming up the stairs in his

undershirt, taking the steps two and three at a time. “Sssh,” he said, putting a finger to

his lips. Tiptoeing behind Joey’s mother, he grabbed her around the sides. She gave a

yelp like a soprano. Hector began tickling her, and she giggled. Then he chased her into

the corner room. “Bye-bye, Mama, be quiet now, okay?” he said, and shut the door

behind him. “Bye-bye,” came a coy, high-pitched voice through the door.

Seconds later, Joey ran out of the bathroom. He jumped past us down the stairs;

he jumped to every landing until he reached the bottom. He slammed the front door so

hard the glass in the frame shook. Upstairs, Mr. Shapiro, who lived in the room next to

the stairs, yelled, “Cocksucker!”

7.

When I returned from walking Cricket, Joey was in the alley yelling up for Wally. Wally

flew down the stairs and Cricket ran to him. Ground pepper looked like it had been

ground into Joey’s baby pink skin. His lips were pink too, but wet and bubbly; his nose

was usually runny. But Joey’s eyes were beautiful, like the color of my teacher’s favorite

dress, a color Miss Jonas said was periwinkle blue. Joey’s eyes were periwinkle blue

with dark centers, and the lashes that framed them were coal black.

“Wanna play?” Joey said. The setting sun glowed behind his head.

He was talking to me, not Wally. “Wo-ree! Go-ree-ya!” Mama yelled down that

dinner was ready. “I’m hungry!” Wally said and ran up the stairs with Cricket.

“Gor-rilll-,“ Joey imitated, holding the note: “laaaaa.”

“I’m not a gorilla and I’ll never play with you!” I said.

After dinner there was a knock at the back door. Joey stood on the porch. “Can

Gorilla come out?”

“Go way. Go-ree-ya beezy,” Mama said. She closed the door. Practice piano,

she told me.

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Mama had bought a piano when Uncle Frank won three hundred dollars at the

racetrack. My teacher was a concert pianist from Vienna who worked as a waiter at the

Edgewater Beach Hotel. I practiced every night after dinner.

Uncle Frank sat with his newspaper while I did scales and chords and Czerny

exercises. He was waiting for his favorite, Begin the Beguine. I worked on a new piece,

Für Elise; it was hard. There was a light tap at the front door. Joey stood in the hall. He

had washed his face, and water clung to his lashes. The faucet in the bathroom was still

running.

“Can I hear Gorilla play?” asked Joey.

“Go home,” said Uncle Frank.

I finished practicing, then listened to Lux Radio Theater and helped Wally with

his numbers. We washed at the kitchen sink and got ready for bed. “Night Ma, night

Ojisan,” said Wally. He liked to use the Japanese word for uncle.

We stepped into the hall. “Ugh!” said Wally, and lifted his foot. Stuck to the

bottom of his slipper was a crush of black and sticky raisins. “It’s like smashed

cockroaches,” he said. Candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, and an empty Dr.

Pepper bottle lined the hall. Black smudges on the wall marked where Joey had propped

his feet.

“Ma! Ojisan!” Wally yelled.

The door to the corner room was open. Don’t get excited, Uncle Frank told

Mama, whose eyes were burning bright. He rapped on the door; there was no answer.

He swung the door wide and we stood in a row, peering in. Mama gripped Wally’s hand.

Uncle Frank stood with his thumb under his chin, his fingers stroking the birthmark on

his cheek. “Maaa,” he said.

Litter covered the room like mold—clothing, bedding, greasy paper sacks, green-

encrusted dishes. A pane in the bay window was broken, the hole stuffed with fraying

cardboard. Bundles of newspapers tilted toward the ceiling. The lemon-colored wall

Mits had painted three months earlier was streaked with grease and dirt, the light fixture

dangled from an exposed wire in the ceiling, the double bed sagged to the floor. It was so

cold there was hardly any odor, only a faint sweet-and-sour smell.

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Uncle Frank gave a low whistle. Wally began to whimper and wrapped his arms

around Mama’s waist. Go to bed, she told me. Take Wally. I imagined an army of

roaches and maggots waiting for the light to go out, for the door to close and the visitors

to leave. I thought how gray and shaggy the hawthorn below the broken window now

looked, how small the leaves that clung to its brittle branches.

8.

Loose lips sink ships. Uncle Sam Wants You. We were told we could help win with our

war bonds, our victory gardens, and our paper drives. Every Saturday, Uncle Frank

walked us to the Collection Center at the Bryn Mawr el station to turn in our papers. I

brought the receipt to school, and Miss Jonas put a gold star next to my name on a big

chart. We kids tacked cartoons on the bulletin board next to the chart—Hitler, looking

like Charlie Chaplin in a Nazi uniform; bald, lantern-jawed Mussolini; and Tojo, with his

bright yellow skin, buck teeth, and thick round glasses. I was glad when Bobby Dillon

drew a bushy purple beard on Tojo that helped cover his yellow face.

The best places for newspapers were at the fancy apartments on Sheridan Beach

Drive. My favorite was the Colonial Arms, where the doorman let us in, and we rode in

the elevator and knocked on white doors with gold doorknobs. One lady on the twelfth

floor said, “Are you Chinese?” Wally jumped in, “We’re Japanese,” and the lady

slammed the door. The next time I told her that Wally and I were Chinese orphans and

could she help us win the war? “Of course,” she said, and brought out a stack of

magazines with shiny covers.

Joey told us Germans and Japs were the Allies. Uncle Frank said the Allies were

American, English, French, Russian, Chinese—I don’t remember who else—and Germans,

Italians and Japanese were Axis, something like that. Uncle Frank never said Jap.

9.

The day before summer vacation, Joey grabbed the boy down the street by the neck of his

t-shirt. “Where you going?” he growled. “P-p-p-p” said Gregory Shinkowski, who

stuttered even when he wasn’t scared. Joey grabbed two stacks of papers from Gregory’s

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wagon and walked away, a stack under each arm. When I came home, Gregory was

standing on the landing on the second floor crying, his t-shirt stretched over his shoulder.

I ran up the stairs two at a time, the blood hot in my face. Joey sat on a pile of

newspapers, holding a page of the funnies, straining with the effort to read. “D-aaag-w-

w-oo-d.” Sweat pooled in the folds of his neck. The air was putrid. I leaned in the

doorway, out of breath. Joey looked up; his eyes were bright in his doughy face.

“Gloria,” he said.

Forgetting the dirt, the litter, the stench of garbage, even that Joey had called me

by the right name, I screamed in his face: “You’re fat and you’re ugly and no one will

ever like you!”

His face kind of rippled, one blubbery fold after another, the way a candle softens

as it melts. For a second, I wanted to take back what I’d said. Then, I was suddenly

afraid, because I realized that I stood in a room where things were smashed and broken,

that I was alone in a room with someone who could snap my neck, stomp on me, throw

me out the bay window. Joey raised his arm, and I flinched, but it was only to reach for

the paper he had been trying to read. He twisted it over and over in his hands like he was

wringing laundry. Then he smoothed the page with his ink-stained fingers and blew his

nose. When he lowered the paper from his face, he licked the mucus on his lips.

I ran home and got into Mama’s and Frank’s bed and put the covers over my

head. When Mama came home, she asked if Joey had hurt me. No, I told her, no. She let

me sleep with her that night, and Uncle Frank slept next door with Wally.

10.

In July, Wally went to day camp and I babysat the Finelli twins for two dollars and fifty

cents a day. Every morning, Mr. Finelli packed a lunch for us before he went to work—

little raviolis and gnocchis and licorice-tasting biscuits that were hard enough to break

your teeth. Mrs. Finelli was going to have a baby and mostly lay on the porch swing

fanning herself. We put the food in a container with a thermos of Kool-Aid and walked

with Cricket to the beach. Whenever we tired of the sand, we walked to the rocks where

the big kids dove in the water.

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I got so brown Mama said I looked like a dojin, a peasant, which I guessed was a

terrible thing to be if you were Japanese. It didn’t matter that Wally got even darker than

me. He was a boy. Mama bought me a mint green parasol at the Edgewater Beach Hotel

gift shop. When I left it on the subway, accidentally on purpose, she didn’t talk to me for

two days.

Joey still knocked on our door almost every evening to ask, “Can Gorilla come

out and play?” He still listened to me practice, leaving candy wrappers and potato chip

crumbs outside our door. He still called to Wally from the alley.

“That cuckoo Kraut’s got a crush on your niece,” said Mr. Finelli. He and Uncle

Frank had been fixing Mr. Finelli’s car; they sat on the back stairs, black with grease,

drinking beer. “You think?” said Uncle Frank, and he looked thoughtful.

“Ugh!” I screamed. “How can anyone think that? He’s filthy! He’s awful!” I

ran upstairs and scrubbed my face with Lifebuoy.

The second week of babysitting the Finellis, Joey followed us to the rocks. “Hey,

Gorilla, guess what? I can dive off the rocks and hold my breath for an hour.”

“Can you, Joey?” said Lorenzo Finelli. “Let’s see.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. I wasn’t going to answer, but I was furious at such a

ridiculous thing. “Nobody can hold their breath that long.”

“Can too,” said Joey. “How long can you hold yours?”

“How do I know?” I said. “I don’t go around counting how long I don’t breathe.”

I had broken the silence for good now.

“Race ya!” said Joey and he jumped off the rocks, making a huge splash.

“Go on, Gloria, go on!” yelled the Finellis. They were jumping up and down so

hard Lance’s swimming trucks slid down his hips.

Joey floated on his back, looking like a rubber raft trying to look like a miniature

whale. Rex, a high school boy who worked at the corner drugstore, sat on the rocks with

his girlfriend and started yelling, “Go, Gloria, go!” Rex’s girlfriend grinned and snapped

her gum; she was wearing a blue and yellow two-piece bathing suit and bright coral

lipstick with matching nail polish. Her hair was the color of gingersnaps.

Joey was still floating, spitting water into the air. “Come-enzi,” he said.

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I began to cry. The Finellis grew quiet. Rex came over and said, “What’s

wrong?”

“I don’t know how.” My teeth chattered and I squeezed my thighs together; I was

afraid I was going to wet my pants. “I’ve only done it off a diving board.”

“Don’t be scared,” said Rex. “Diving off the rocks is easier than a diving board.

Watch.”

He took the beach towel I was clinging to and set it gently down. The Finelli

twins came forward and sat on it. Rex’s girlfriend looked bored; she started smearing

herself with suntan lotion.

Rex led me to the edge of the rocks and pressed his hand lightly on my back. My

arms came up automatically, my knees bent. His breath was warm in my ear. “Aim over

there”—he raised a golden arm and pointed—“and push off.” I tiptoed and bounced off

the edge of the rocks, cutting into the water like a knife, making hardly a splash. When I

came up, I treaded water and peed; the water was warm around my legs. Then I swam

over to Joey and floated face down. I held my breath and counted to myself—“one

potato . . . two potato . . . three potato . . . four”—until I came up for air.

“Thirty-two!” Rex shouted. His arm was coming down like a referee at a boxing

match. Lance and Lorenzo were jumping up and down on my beach towel. Cricket was

excited; she ran up and down the rocks barking. Everyone told Joey to float on his face.

He came up at the count of five.

“That don’t count,” he sputtered. “I try again,” and he went down after inhaling a

lungful of air. He bounced up in nine seconds, gasping. We all clapped and laughed.

“You won! You got him!”

I clung to the edge of the rocks and climbed out of the water. Joey came out too,

his belly flopping over the top of his trunks. Water clung to his lashes and made them

glisten; his eyes sparkled like blue fire. It was as if the water had cleansed him and made

him a new person. Joey started counting, “Eins, zwei, drie, vier . . .” as if he was still

under water. Then he threw back his head and laughed, showing his chipped and

yellowed teeth, spit bubbling in the corners of his mouth. He lay on the rocky ledge and

rolled with laughter. He looked like a happy baby hippo.

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Even Rex’s girlfriend laughed. Rex stood next to her with his arm around her

bare waist. When he brought a cigarette from behind his ear and put it in his mouth, she

took a Zippo lighter out of the top of her bathing suit; I could see the deep crease between

her pointy breasts. Rex bent his head over her cupped hands and lit his cigarette. I felt I

was watching something secret and wonderful.

“Let’s go and see my mother!” I said.

I snapped Cricket’s leash on her collar. Joey and the Finellis yelled, “Yeah!”

We went to the back entry of the Edgewater Beach Hotel and walked through the

green, iron gate. We stood at the guardhouse in our wet bathing suits and bare, sandy

feet.

“My mother works here,” I told the man in the green and gold uniform. “She’s

the maid, Mrs. Michi Morita.”

He picked up the red telephone. “Murphy here, sweetheart. Get me Maid Service,

will ya?”

“Look!” Lorenzo said. “He’s got on white gloves.”

“Hey, mister,” said Lance, “are those real gold buttons?”

“Sure thing, kiddo.” He gave Lance a wink.

When Mama came out, she looked worried.

“These monkeys yours, Mama-san?”said Murphy. Oh, oh, I thought.

“Guess what, Mama?”I said. “I dove off the rocks today.” I brought up my arms

and made a diver’s pose.

“Ja,” said Joey. “Ja, gut!” Lance and Lorenzo giggled.

“Go home, Go-ree-ya.”

“What’s her name?” asked Murphy.

“Gloria,” I said quickly.

“Sounded like gorilla,” said Murphy. His teeth were very white.

“Go home,” said Mama.

Mama hated being a maid at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Rich white people were

spoiled, she said. Their money was too new. She came from a samurai family in Japan.

So did Papa—his family was even older, higher up. Uncle Frank said isn’t it funny,

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every Japanese in America comes from a samurai family. There must not be any

peasants in Japan.

She used to laugh when Uncle Frank said things like that in camp; she laughed a

lot then, but things had changed. Now she worried about money, our education, the

future. Education came first. Fitting in. Piano, ballet lessons, Sunday school, Girl

Scouts. Cub Scouts for Wally; piano lessons didn’t take. College, so we could be with

the right people. In America, you can do anything. But you must be better, work harder,

study harder, be American two-hundred percent.

11.

On the Fourth of July, Uncle Frank lost the rent money and Mama had to use some of our

college savings. On Pearl Harbor day, Papa had given her cash from the cannery office

safe that he had saved since his wedding day—one dollar a week from his cannery

worker’s salary, increasing as he was promoted to bookkeeper, assistant paymaster, and,

finally, manager. All through camp, she’d kept the money in a purple silk sash tied

around her waist—the brick, Wally called it. Now it had come to this. She accused

Frank of taking the food out of her children’s mouths. It’s only a setback, he said; he’d

never let anything hurt us. She said he was nothing but big talk. Her kids go to school

with bedbug bites; they live with crazy people. You lose my money; you drag us into the

gutter. Money, money! he shouted. He called her Jew of the Orient. She called him

nobody. Go get drunk, she told him. Go hang out with your China ladies. Look who’s

talking about class and manners, he said. She’s the phony, a two-faced liar. He was

talking about Papa’s letters from Santa Fe and Mama’s promises to go back to Monterey

after the war. I want to die, she screamed.

Cricket had peed because Wally had forgotten to walk her, and Mama slipped on

the linoleum. She grabbed Cricket by the back of the neck and threw her down the porch

stairs. Cricket rolled to the landing, then scampered down the stairs into the alley. Wally

started crying and ran after her. “Kichi-gai”—lunatic—said Uncle Frank, and followed

Wally.

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Mama picked up all of Cricket’s things and threw them into the alley—her dog

dish and water bowl, her red collar and leash, boxes of Friskies and Milk Bones—

screaming in Japanese and in broken English. Mrs. Youngblood on the second floor

opened her screen door and hollered, “Shut up! There’s a baby sleeping here!” Mama

ran to the railing and yelled down, “You shut up you self!” Mrs. Youngblood answered

back, “Bitch!” Her baby, who lay in a crib on the porch, started crying.

Mama ran into the kitchen and picked up Wally’s homework from the table. She

tore out the pages in his reader and slammed the cover against the wall. I scurried after

her, crouching to pick the pages off the floor. Then she pulled the oilcloth off the table

and tried to rip it with her hands. When it wouldn’t tear, she ran to the pantry for the

butcher knife and slashed at the oilcloth until it hung in red and white checked strips. She

held the knife over her head and brought it down on the table, again and again, until the

knife stuck in the top, and she looked around, panting.

She saw the Pueblo Indian doll Papa had sent me, thrown to the floor. “No!” I

screamed and ran toward my doll, but Mama picked it up and I could only catch one of

its flailing arms. Then I heard a ripping sound and a fabric-filled stump tore off in my

hands. Colored beads flew through the air, making a waterfall of tinny sounds as they

skittered across the floor. When the last bead lay silent, Mama and I looked at each

other. I dropped the ruined arm, grabbed my plaid schoolbag, and ran to the door. When

I looked back, she was standing against the wall, the one-armed doll in her hands, her

hair wild across her face. She slid to the floor, hugging the doll to her chest.

“I hate you,” I said under my breath, and shut the door.

Joey’s mother stood in the doorway of the corner room. She said something in

German as I walked past. Kinder-something. I stopped, and she said it again, so softly I

could barely hear. Kinder-something. She shook her head and looked very, very sad.

I found a dime in my bag and walked to the corner drugstore. Rex was working at

the soda fountain. I’d had a crush on him ever since the diving match, but now I barely

noticed him. I sat at the counter and ordered a Green River. I knew my face was

streaked with dirt and tears and one of my braids was undone, but Rex didn’t tease me or

say anything about how I looked. I had scraped my knuckles and they were beginning to

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sting. Yet I felt calm, grown-up. I took out my notebook and my favorite red Scripto

pencil and began to write in big, sweeping arcs, not the tiny cramped figures I usually

made. I was writing so fast that the lead kept breaking. It wasn’t until Rex handed me

the No. 2 pencil in his shirt pocket that I went back to making small, even numbers in

neat columns. I did my multiplication tables while Rex mopped the floors. Finally, he

turned off the neon sign outside.

“Gotta close, Gloria,” he said. “You okay?”

The sky was changing into night and streaked with pink. A silver slice of the

moon shone through. I wondered if Mama was still mad at me, and whether she was

crazy like Uncle Frank said. Maybe she’d beat me; maybe she’d stab me with the

butcher knife. Papa wouldn’t allow it. Why wasn’t he here? Why were we so far from

home and all these terrible things happening to us? Had I really said, “I hate you,” or had

I only thought it? Did I really hate my mother? What would I do if it was true?

Uncle Frank and Wally had returned with Cricket. The door to the second room

was shut. Everything Mama had thrown into the alley had been put away—Cricket’s

collar and leash on its hook behind the back door, her dish and water bowl on a folded

newspaper in the corner, the doggie biscuits on the shelf above the stove. The floor was

swept, the pages of Wally’s reader Scotch-taped and placed between the covers, the torn

oilcloth folded and set on the table. There was no sign of my Pueblo Indian doll.

“She went to bed,” whispered Wally. He and Uncle Frank were opening a carton

of ice cream.

“You know why Neapolitan’s the best kind, Ojisan?” asked Wally.

“Do shite?” said Uncle Frank. Why?

“Cuz you get three in one. Strawberry, vanilla and chocolate. It’s a big savings,

huh?”

“You good boy, Wo-ree,” said Frank. He leaned over and plopped a scoop of

Neapolitan into Cricket’s dish.

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12.

In August, the news came over the radio. A bomb was dropped over Japan that was

supposed to end the war. Uncle Frank came home early from work and didn’t say hi and

went into his old room, the room Wally and I slept in. It got dark and Uncle Frank didn’t

come out and we didn’t get any dinner. When Mama came home, she told us to make

American cheese sandwiches, but we were out of bread. I wanted to open a can of Spam,

but Wally had broken off the key and we couldn’t fit the can opener around the square

edges. There was orange Jello in the icebox that Uncle Frank made the night before; we

covered it with Miracle Whip and ate out of the bowl.

Across the hall, Joey and his mother were at it again. In the middle of her

screaming, Joey ran out in his bare feet and slammed the door, jumped down the steps to

each landing, and slammed the front door, shaking the glass.

“Son-of-a-bitching cocksucker!” Mr. Shapiro yelled.

Mama knocked on Uncle Frank’s door. We followed her, but she told us to go

back. “Kamo-san,” we heard her softly call. She knocked again. “Kamo.” After a long

time, the door opened slightly. The room was dark and Mama went in.

When she returned, she started cooking. Wally and I looked at each other because

we knew Mama didn’t cook. She attacked the can of Spam with the butcher knife and

fried it in thick slices, not thin ones like Uncle Frank made. She washed a pot of rice and

put it on the stove. Uncle Frank always let the rice sit after he washed it. Because she

didn’t turn down the flame when the rice boiled over, it burned on the bottom and was

sticky on top. She sliced an onion and fried it with soy sauce. Wally picked the slices off

his plate and arranged them in a circle on the table. I thought, Oh, oh, but Mama didn’t

notice. She didn’t say anything about Wally putting his elbows on the table or kicking

my chair. She didn’t say anything about his not washing his hands.

“Mama, make him stop kicking.” I pushed my chair away.

“Stop, Wo-ree,” she said, but that was all.

Mama let me wash the dishes after we ate, which she hardly ever let me do

because I needed smooth hands to be a pianist. She took a plate of burnt rice with onions

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and Spam to Uncle Frank and a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. She didn’t come back

that night.

In the morning, Uncle Frank made pancakes with powdered milk. Mama came in

from the bathroom in the blue cotton robe that looked like a kimono because it had

droopy sleeves and white cherry blossoms across the back. She had just taken a bath and

her skin was pink and glowing.

Uncle Frank complained that there was no bread. Mama said sorry, the store

didn’t have any. She looked sideways at me because I knew that was a lie. Mama didn’t

like going to the National because she hated to stand in line and have people stare at her.

She hated to ask for things in her broken English.

Uncle Frank began making rice balls from the leftover rice and pressed pickled

radishes into the centers. He shook his head when he saw the rice stuck to the bottom of

the pot, but he didn’t say anything. He divided the rice balls and pulled out a roll of

waxed paper.

“I want a peanut butter sandwich,” Wally said. He was going to day camp at Cub

Scouts.

“No bread,” said Uncle Frank. He stood in his undershirt and lit a Camel. Black

hair poked out from his armpits.

“That stuff will stink up the bus!” said Wally. “Wo-ree . . .” Mama started to

speak, but Wally kept going. “I want something American!”

“Baka!” Uncle Frank slammed his lunchbox on the counter.

Wally started and we stared at Uncle Frank. We had never heard him yell before.

He palmed three rice balls and threw them into his lunchbox. Then he yanked his shirt

off the ironing board, pulled his straw hat off the hook, and strode to the door. Uncle

Frank always wore his hat slantwise; every morning he looked in the mirror to make it

look just right. This time, he stuck it on his head and walked out in his undershirt,

slamming the door behind him.

“You did it now,” I said, giving Wally a pinch. He started to cry.

“Oh, shut up!” I said. “You really are a baka!”

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Mama went to dress and I cleaned up the kitchen. Wally didn’t say a word; he

just followed me around. When Mama came out, she was holding her purse.

“Take,” she said, and gave Wally a dollar bill. “For buy runch.” Wally’s eyes

opened wide; he’d never had paper money before. Mama also gave me money for bread.

Then she went to work.

13.

Three days later, another bomb was dropped on a place called Nagasaki.

“The war is over! The war is over!” Mrs. Youngblood stood on the back porch

and threw her baby’s diapers in the air.

Neighbors sat on stoops drinking beer and singing. Even Joey’s mother came out.

Her dress had lost its buttons; white skin poked out between parts held by safety pins.

She walked up and down the sidewalk, wringing her hands and talking fast. Nobody

understood her. They imitated her accent and called her “Sausage Butt” and

“Sauerkraut.” But everybody was in a good mood, and when someone offered her a beer

she drank it in one gulp.

The Finelli twins had sparklers left over from Fourth of July and some of the

grownups lit firecrackers. Joey ran up and down the street repeating what people said

about the war as if he had an important job. The crowds are gathering in Times Square.

The terms of surrender will be signed. Victory over Japan.

“Fat Joey thinks he’s Edward R. Murrow,” said our landlady’s boyfriend, a new

guy with glasses named Melvin.

Rex rode his motorcycle up and down the alley. Little American flags were tied

to the handlebars; his girlfriend sat behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist. Even

the people on the el waved to us; we could see into the lighted cars. Uncle Frank stood

on the porch smoking his Camels and watching the trains pass. Mama sat, patting

Cricket’s head.

All up Winthrop and down Foster and across to Broadway, drivers tooted their

horns. People turned on their radios full blast, sometimes only to listen to crowd noises

and horns tooting in other cities. The yards were lit with bonfires; people gathered

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everywhere. Wally and I went to all the backyard parties on our block and all the way to

the Bryn Mawr station. We roasted hotdogs and marshmallows on coat hangers and

drank free root beer and orange pop. We ran home to use the bathroom, then jumped

down the stairs to run out again. I noticed that Mr. Shapiro’s door had a light under it,

but he didn’t come out and yell at us. We didn’t hear “Go-ree-ya!” or “Wo-ree!” either.

Wally and I stayed out until it was so late only the drunks were left. When we

returned to the Rosebud, we climbed up the back stairs. Mama and Uncle Frank were

still sitting on the porch. They hadn’t turned on the lights inside; the porch was dark

except for the glow of their cigarettes.

“Goodnight, Mama. Goodnight, Ojisan,” I said.

“Night,” said Wally. “We won, you know?”

“Oyasumi na sai,” Mama said. Rest well.

“When will Papa be coming home?” I asked. Silence. “Soon,” she said.

The next day, I asked Uncle Frank, “Which side did you want to win?”

“I am happy war over,” he said. But he didn’t look happy.

14.

In mid-August, the trouble in the corner room got worse, and Mr. Shapiro threatened to

call the police. Evelyn sent her boyfriend to calm things down. In late August, Mr.

Shapiro sent Wally to tell Evelyn that Joey was yelling that his mother had a knife.

Evelyn wanted to call the police, but her new boyfriend, Gunter, said he’d talk to Joey’s

mother. He was from Germantown. He came upstairs in short pants and long socks and

stood outside Joey’s mother’s door.

“Wie heissen Sie? Ich heisse Gunter Parlow.” He made a little bow to the door.

“What’re you saying?” asked Wally.

“I say my name. I ask her to open please,” whispered Gunter. He put his ear to

the door. “Sprechen,” he said. And “Bitte.”

The door opened and Joey ran out crying. He jumped down the stairs and

slammed the front door. The glass shook in its frame like always.

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Joey’s mother sat in the bay window clutching a butcher knife. Gunter went in

and sat next to her, pushing the junk off the window seat. He spoke to her in a low voice,

but she didn’t reply. Evelyn, Wally and I stood in the doorway. The smell of garbage

rotting in the heat made me gag. After a while, Gunter slipped the butcher knife out of

Joey’s mother’s hands. He patted her on the back many times.

The paddy wagon came the day before Labor Day. When Mama, Wally and I

came home from the back-to-school special at Goldblatt’s, two men were carrying Joey’s

mother down the stairs. She was strapped to a stretcher and the men grunted and sweat.

It reminded me of the time my piano had to be carried up the back stairs.

“S’cuse us,” said one of the men, and we pressed against the wall to let them pass.

Joey’s mother didn’t say anything. She lay on the stretcher, her tangled hair covering her

face.

The smell of ammonia made my eyes sting. Pee was trickling down Joey’s

mother’s legs. “Oh, Christ!” said one of the men and adjusted his balance. Wally held

his Goldblatt bag in front of his face. Mama raised her handkerchief to her nose.

“Kawaiso,” she said. Poor thing. Joey was nowhere to be seen.

15.

After dinner, I practiced while Uncle Frank read his Chicago Tribune. After I played

Begin the Beguine, he put down his paper and applauded. There was a knock at the front

door. Wally came in and said, “Joey wants Gloria to come out and play.”

Mama walked out from the kitchen. “Go way, she told Joey. “Go-ree-ya beezy.”

“That’s okay, Mama,” I said, going to the door. She looked at me with her X-ray

eyes.

“Tomorrow Go-ree-ya have to go school,” she told Joey.

“You don’t have to lie, Mother. Tomorrow’s Labor Day.” We looked at each

other. She turned and went into the kitchen.

“I can’t come out and play, Joey, but I’ll play you something.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. He landed on the floor with a thud.

I left the front door open.

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I played Für Elise because it was the piece I did best and because Joey always

sang along. Out in the hall I heard his “da la la la la lala la lum.” I wanted to tell him

that when I was learning Für Elise, I’d follow his voice whenever I got lost.

Next, I practiced Schubert’s Scherzo in B-flat Major. It was hard and I made a lot

of mistakes. Wally was on the floor making airplane noises with his models and Mama

was in the kitchen sewing on her Singer. Sometimes Uncle Frank cleared his throat or

rustled the paper when he turned the pages. I wondered if Joey was still outside.

Pretty soon, Uncle Frank got up and went into the kitchen to talk to Mama. I

could hear their murmured voices, their soft laughter. When I finished, I walked to the

door. Joey was gone. The door to the corner room was closed.

The next day, I heard voices in the hall. Joey was walking down the stairs with a

woman in a gray suit and a floppy hat. His hair was slicked down, but part of it stuck up

in back. He wore a white, wrinkled shirt and short, olive green pants with high socks, the

kind Gunter wore, and he carried the suitcase tied with rope.

I leaned over the banister and Joey looked up.

“Good-bye, Gorilla,” he said. The spit on his lips glistened.

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AWAKE IN THE DARK

1.

Donnie elevated subway trains until dawn. At seven-fifteen when his mother called to

him, he pulled the covers over his head. Then he remembered what day it was and he sat

up, wide-eyed, on the edge of his cot.

Kathleen stood in the doorway holding her stockings. “Hurry, hon. The Hymies

are up.”

He ran barefooted across the hall to beat the family of five to the bathroom. He

watched the stream of his urine splash into the toilet bowl and, shivering with fear and

happiness, thought about the note.

Kathleen knocked on the door. “Gotta run, mister. Eat some cereal, okay?”

He shouted his agreement, mouth full of Pepsodent, and ran out in time to watch

her walk down the hall like a model on a runway. She stopped at the head of the stairs,

sliding her hands down her hips to smooth her bright-blue pencil skirt, then walked down

the stairs. Donnie hooked his elbows over the banister, toothbrush clutched in one hand,

and peered down the stairwell, watching the figure of his mother grow smaller. At the

bottom, she stood in the light that shone through the glass door, looked up, and waved.

The note was on the kitchen table, tucked in the folds of yesterday’s Chicago

Tribune, where he and Jack had left it.

April 7, 1950

To Whom It May Concern:

I will be picking up my son Donald from school at 10:15 this morning to accompany me to a manger’s meeting I will be leading at the Merchandise Mart. The experience will be of enduring educational value.

Yours truly,

John R. Robyns

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They had sat at the table the night before, where his father had made the swooping

J’s and R’s of his name and included the business card from his last job. The “enduring

educational value” part was Jack’s last-minute touch. He had rewritten the note, crushing

the first, more mundane, draft in his palm, and tossed it over his shoulder. The wad of

paper made a graceful arc into the wastepaper basket and Donnie’s lips formed a silent

“O!” His father winked at him and pointed his finger like a gun.

“Outstanding!” said Jack.

“Outstanding!” said Donnie.

Jack Robyns’ eyes barely flickered when Donnie asked if Mom was coming. “No

girls in the Hookey Club, right, tough guy? En garde!” He made a thrust with his coffee

spoon, pointing it into Donnie’s chest.

2.

On the way to school, Donnie told his best friend Chester Dalrymple about The Plan.

“Triple secret, swear?” and they hooked little fingers. Lunch at the Loop, then a double

feature at the old Biograph, where John Dillinger had been shot by G-men.

“He’s coming after second period, Ches. He’s got a meeting with his boss first. I

bet he’s going to get a raise. He’s taking the whole day off.”

That had been it. Then his dad would drive up to the curb in Flash, their maroon

Studebaker, and swoop Donnie away.

“The Loop? That place with the big painting?” Chester’s plumb forehead

creased. “Where we went on your birthday?”

“So what?” said Donnie. His stomach was beginning to churn. “What about it?”

“Bout nothing, Don. Geeze!”

They stood on the corner and waited for the patrol boy to signal their safety.

“Hi Wally,” Chester said to the Japanese boy who held the green crossing flag. A

woman, shivering in her housecoat, hurried two identically dressed boys to the corner.

“Mind Wally, now,” Mrs. Finelli said. The boys fidgeted at the curb.

The patrol boy smiled and walked them across the street.

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After second period, Donnie stood in front of Grady Grammar, listening for the

syncopated beeps of the maroon Studebaker. After third period, he huddled in the

doorway and tugged at his arms. He wished he’d brought his navy blue blazer. When

the noon bell rang, he ducked into the candy shop across the street and watched for the

Studebaker through the plate glass window. Wally was in the crosswalk, guiding the

Finelli twins back. Chester ran past with Jerry and Spencer from their sixth grade class.

Donnie ducked his head, hoping they hadn’t seen him.

3.

“The place with the painting,” Chester had said. The Loop. Chester had been invited to

celebrate Donnie’s eleventh birthday that summer.

They were escorted to a leather banquette under a ten-foot high painting of a

forest on fire. It was an energetic picture, framed ornately. At first, Donnie thought the

leaves were red and yellow because it was autumn. Then, as he got closer, he realized

that flames licked the branches of the trees and wild-eyed animals skittered across the

forest floor. Blood-orange sparks flecked against the purple sky. It was the most

impressive painting Donnie had ever seen. He was both frightened and thrilled by its

ferocity.

They’d ordered Salisbury steak and crinkly fried potatoes and chocolate sundaes

for dessert. He and Chester each drank three Roy Rogers. His father had double bloody

Mary’s--“Two olives, lime twist, no salt on the rim, okay?”--then switched to double

shots of vodka. He’d ordered the last two drinks booming, “Set ‘em up, Joe!” The

waiter, on whose jacket “Dennis” was embroidered, grimaced. The bloody Mary’s came

with green pimento olives on red wooden picks, and the Roy Rogers were served with

maraschino cherries on yellow picks.

After each drink, Jack showed the boys how to make a catsup mark on the white

tablecloth with their butter knives, like gunslingers, and they piled the red and yellow

picks into a teepee, decorated with maraschino cherry stems and lime peels. They left

behind a pyramid of bloody Mary, Roy Rogers, and vodka glasses and a pile of crumpled

bills, twice the amount of the check.

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Outside, Jack stood in front of a plate glass window and pulled out a pair of

green-tinted glasses. He placed them on the bridge of his slender nose. His reflection

was superimposed onto one of the mannequins, who wore a white tuxedo with a red

cummerbund. Donnie stepped into the picture, also superimposing himself onto a

mannequin; his wore a silver-sequined cocktail dress. He and Jack stared at their

reflections and laughed.

People said his father looked like a movie star. Alan Ladd, but taller. Better,

thought Donnie.

They walked up State Street. The marquee of the Chicago Theatre was

emblazoned with lights: “Nat King Cole.”

“Who’s that?” asked Chester.

“He’s like Bing Crosby, except he’s a Negro,” said Donnie.

“Really?” said Chester.

They turned the corner at Randolph. A large blue banner with “The King of the

Cowboys and his Golden Horse, Trigger” in silver letters stretched over the carved

dragons of the Oriental Theatre.

When they walked into the red and gold lobby, the cowboy star and his horse

stood on a white pedestal, surrounded by children and their parents. Roy held the

microphone close to his thin, smirky lips and talked to a little girl dressed in a white

leather outfit decorated with fringe.

“Where’s Bullet, the Wonder Dog?” she asked.

A woman with upswept hair put a hand on her hip and said, “Where’s Dale?”

“Home at the ranch,” Roy said, “keeping each other company.” The skin around

his eyes crinkled.

“Who’s keeping you company, Roy?” said the woman.

“My trusty friend, Trigger,” said Roy.

Trigger whinnied and the crowd applauded. Donnie always thought Roy talked

with a smile in his voice.

Jack Robyns pressed a sharply creased bill into the palm of the usher, who raised

the thick velvet rope. When a man in a camelhair coat objected to their stepping ahead,

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Jack grabbed him by the lapels, his face suddenly enflamed. Nearly a head taller than his

opponent, Jack raised the man nearly off his feet, staring nose to nose into the startled,

doughy face.

A boy, his cowboy hat slipping over his forehead, whimpered at the man’s side.

The sound made Jack look down, and he released the man as suddenly as he had grabbed

him. Straightening the shoulder of the camelhair coat as if he were closing a sale, Jack

placed his lips close to the man’s ear.

“Sorry, friend. But you wouldn’t keep a dying boy from seeing his favorite

cowboy hero, would you?” He gestured toward Donnie, who’d retreated to the other side

of the rope. Smiling his crooked Alan Ladd smile, Jack gently straightened the little

boy’s outsized hat. Chester stood nearby, mouth agape.

By the time the stage show had begun, featuring Rogers, Trigger, and The Sons of

the Pioneers, Jack had slipped out of his aisle seat. After the stage show, the new Roy

Rogers-Dale Evans movie played, then a repeat of the stage show, then another round of

the movie. At each intermission, Donnie looked in the lobby and men’s rooms for his

father.

At eight o’clock, he talked to an usher who sent for the manager. The boys

followed the dark-suited man past the goldfish pond in the lobby, copper pennies

gleaming on its bottom, past walls covered with oil paintings in gilt frames, past red

velvet drapes held with gold-tasseled rope. They climbed a flight of marble stairs that

widened at the top and walked to a door marked “Private” in small bronzed letters. They

entered a red-and-gold carpeted office where a heavyset man sat behind a large oak desk.

Donnie called his mother from a black telephone on the desk. Kathleen Robyns arrived

on the el and took the boys home.

Donnie’s father was gone for two days. When he returned, he tiptoed into the front room

and sat in the dark on the edge of the folding cot. Donnie lay with his face to the

window, the covers pulled tightly over his head, hoping for an elevated train to break the

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silence. There was only his father’s raspy breath and his shoe kicking against the metal

frame.

“Donald?”

Donnie held his breath. He was sweltering under the covers. After a while, the

springs creaked and the weight on the mattress lifted. The door opened, then shut with a

soft click.

Donnie let out an expulsion of air and kicked off the blankets. Then he fell asleep

to his father’s shouting, his mother’s soft cries, and the rolling of elevated trains across

the tracks.

In the morning, Jack told him that a secret mission had called him away from the

Oriental Theatre, important work for the government.

“When you’re older you’ll understand,” he had said, setting down his glass of

tomato juice. It made a sharp sound on the cracked tile counter.

“Are you still my Donald? Are you still my man?”

Donnie looked into his father’s pale face. “You should’ve heard the Sons of the

Pioneers, Dad. They sang your favorite, ‘Cool, Cool Water.’”

4.

Now he watched the leaves blow across the schoolyard and shifted from one foot to the

other, counting forwards, then backwards, then in ten’s. “He’ll come when I get to ten-

hundred-and-ten . . . A, my name is Albert and my wife’s name is Alice . . . He’ll come

when I get to Q . . . Q, my name is Quincy and my wife’s name is Queenie and we come

from Quebec with a boatload of Quakers.”

He imagined the maroon Studebaker gliding up to the curb, his father giving the

three ritual beeps that announced his arrival. “Hey, Sport!” And his father would tell

him the best, the funniest, the most cocklemanie reasons why he hadn’t been on time,

why he didn’t call or couldn’t come, and why, why, why he wasn’t like, couldn’t be like,

didn’t want to be like other dads. He was special. He looked like a movie star. Better.

If only he would drive up right now in Flash and his mother was in the front seat

next to him. She would open the door on the passenger side and slide out of the car. She

140

would stretch her long legs toward the pavement, put one ankle-strapped shoe down, then

the other. Her high heels would click on the sidewalk and up the school steps, and

Donnie would slide down the banister to her waiting arms. They would laugh and turn to

his father, who would beam at them from Flash’s window.

He didn’t have to raise his head to know her footsteps. Kathleen stood at the bottom of

the concrete stairs. She was holding his navy blue blazer.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked.

“Donno,” she said softly.

“What’s he got to do that for?” He began to shout. “He promised. We had a

plan. He promised for sure this time.” He pressed his face into the soft down of her

jacket.

They walked, crossing the grassy playfield to Broadway and Foster, past the

empty lot, past the Cadillac dealership. The salesmen in their dark suits watched them.

One, who looked like the manager, silver-haired and pot-bellied, leaned against the fin-

shaped fender of a blue El Dorado, one sharply creased pant leg crossed over the other.

Three younger men stood on the sidewalk holding cigarettes, smoke curling through their

fingers.

Donnie and Kathleen walked unhurriedly past the showroom holding hands; they

watched their reflections in the double-paned show window.

Donnie knew that times like these were special. He knew that they were taking a

subtle test he didn’t quite understand and that they had measured up; that, somehow, it

was the magical combination of the two of them, not just his beautiful mother, that

appealed—Donnie in his navy blue blazer and short pants, Kathleen with her dark red

hair and heart-shaped face.

He’d seen before how they enchanted people, especially when Jack was with

them and they became a family, beautiful and whole. He knew that, in some romantic

boyhood adventure-novel way, they gave their fading north side neighborhood the

promise of something—something familiar, maybe, from before the war—something that

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the legless vet who pushed himself on a platform with his hands, or the Sephardic grocer

with the kosher dills and spiced meat, or the Appalachians who slept four to a Murphy

bed in their basement apartment never could. To the people who worked at the five-and-

dime, or the Ardmore movie theater, or the National grocery chain, Donnie and his

mother and father were what was right with the old days—before the wounded and the

foreign and the migrant moved in, before there were too many bars and liquor stores and

secondhand dealers and hock shops.

Donnie and his mother stood, under the gaze of the Cadillac salesmen, and waited

for the light to change.

He’d always known his mother was special. She was younger and prettier than

any of his friends’ mothers. She wore coral lipstick and matching nail polish, and

smelled like warm flowers. She brushed her eyelashes with something that made them

thick and shiny.

“Is it right that this boy’s got these lashes?” she’d tease. “I’d kill for ones that

curly.” She’d pout her coral-colored lips, and he’d laugh.

She knew all the movie stars’ names and who they were married to and how they

got famous, like Lana Turner who was discovered sitting at a soda fountain. Her favorite

shoes were the kind with skinny high heels and straps that wrapped around her ankles.

“Am I straight, Hon?” she’d say, asking about the seams in the back of her

stockings. And she would stand with her legs together and peer over her shoulder like

the Betty Grable pinup picture that used to hang in his dad’s war locker.

“It’s a little crooked on the left,” Donnie would say, or he’d shout “Outstanding!,”

like his dad, and purse his lips to blow a weak wolf’s whistle.

It was their routine almost every morning, his watching her dress for work. She’d

brush her shoulder-length hair under in what was called a “page boy,” or she’d pile it

high, with combs that stuck out like little wings on each side of her head. She never

came out of the house in curlers like his friend Spencer Grove’s mother. She wasn’t fat

like Jerry Carmichael’s mother and wasn’t old like Chester’s mom, even though Donnie

liked going to Chester’s flat because Mrs. Dalrymple made fried chicken every Sunday

and spaghetti and meatballs on Thursdays. Donnie’s mother didn’t cook. Mrs.

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Dalrymple was forty-three and had six kids and gray hair. Donnie knew she probably

had a first name, but he couldn’t imagine her having one—she was Mrs. Dalrymple. His

mother’s name, Kathleen, was the best name he’d ever heard.

She was working in hosiery at Magnin’s but had been promoted to the cosmetics

counter. “I get a commission,” she said. “They’re gonna train me to do makeup.” She

told him not to tell Jack. “Not yet.”

She began to stop after work for a drink, or sometimes dinner, with her

department store friends. Cosmetics was different, she said. More like a career than a

job. She was meeting managers and buyers. Salesmen from the big companies—Revlon,

Helena Rubenstein, Coty—brought her free samples. Everyone said she had potential.

They arrived at the Bryn Mawr station. “I wish your dad hadn’t let you down,”

said Kathleen. “I had plans.”

“What for?”

She lowered her gaze. “Out of town.” Her lashes made shadows on the thin flesh

under her eyes.

“Where to?”

“It’s business, hon. One of the buyers wants company.” She pulled him over to a

bench. “You know I can’t stay with your dad any more.”

“Please, Mom.”

“I’ve tried, Donnie.”

“Can’t you try some more?” Her eyes were the color of the water at the deep end

of the pool at the Y. His dad’s were light, full of sun.

“When you’re older you’ll understand.” She took his hands in hers. “Promise.”

“When you coming back?”

“It’s just for the weekend, mister. But listen, we’ve got to move beforehand.

Your dad not showing up made up my mind for good.”

“Where will we go?”

“Mrs. Dalrymple wants you to sleep over for a couple of days. When I get back

we’ll go over to my friend’s. He’s got a swell flat near Lincoln Park. Just for a little

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while, sweetie.” She was chewing on her bottom lip. “Chester’s real excited you’re

coming over.”

Chester excited? Mrs. Dalrymple with her six kids wanted him to sleep over?

Coral lipstick was smudged on one of his mother’s eye teeth. He suddenly felt sorry for

his beautiful mother and her beautiful teeth smudged with lipstick. He wondered how

long she’d been lying to him, and he wanted to tell her it was okay, she could tell the

truth now. The words wouldn’t come. All he could think of were the words to “Cool,

Cool Water.”

Kathleen rose from the bench and smoothed the back of her skirt. “Gotta go get

our stuff.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, hon. It’ll be hell if your dad gets back.”

“I can help, Mom. Lift things and stuff.”

“My friend can do that. You wait for us, okay? Why don’t you go to the movies?

I told Chester’s mother you wouldn’t be over until after supper.”

She began to walk up the stairs; her heels echoed on the metal rungs. Standing

below, Donnie looked up at her. She stared back at him.

“Straighten me up?”

“You’re straight, Mom. But you’ve got a run. I saw it this morning.”

“Oh, shoot, why didn’t you say so?”

Donnie shrugged.

“Which side?” She arched her back like a ballerina.

“That one,” he pointed to her left leg. “Mom?”

“What, Donald?” Her voice was impatient. The el was coming.

“It was on the other side before. I was going to tell you, but you said you’d be

late.”

“Don’t be silly.”

They ran up the steps. She took a breath as if to say something, but the train

pulled up to the platform.

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On the el, Donnie watched his mother’s lips move as she told him the plan. He

would go to the movies. She and the salesman, Mr. Worth, would move their belongings

to his flat. They would pick Donnie up at the movies in Mr. Worth’s new Buick. They

would take him to Chester’s, where everyone was excited he was staying over.

They got off at the Argyle stop and walked in silence.

The Ardmore was a second-run theater. Donnie had seen his first movies there—

Lassie Come Home, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, My Friend Flicka—years after

their release. He had fallen asleep during Casablanca and his father had carried him to

the car, Kathleen’s arm tucked in Jack’s. Sometimes he would pretend to be asleep, and

he would listen to the crack of Jack’s Dentyne gum, feel the working of his father’s jaw

against his cheek, inhale the mint and alcohol on his breath. Donnie was sorry when he

grew too heavy to be carried.

Under the marquee, the neon lights hummed like angry bees. The first “R” and

the “D” had gone out, the “A” was flickering. The sign flashed “AMORE” in tall, red

letters.

Kathleen led Donnie to the ticket booth.

“Hi, Ardis, it’s just the little guy today.”

The plump woman smiled down at him from her high stool. She picked up a

cigarette from a glass ashtray full of lipstick-stained butts and lit it. The glass booth

filled with smoke.

“Sit on the aisle, and we’ll find you,” said Kathleen. “Oh, look, hon, it’s Rita

Hayworth.” She peered into the case at the entry. “I love her. Wish I could see it with

you.”

She walked to the other poster. “Treasure of Sierra Madre. That sounds like

something you’d like. Is it a cowboy? There’s a Margaret O’Brien movie too. Here’s a

dollar, sweetie. Get yourself some popcorn and soda pop. Not too much candy, though,

okay?”

Donnie stood with his back to the double doors of the auditorium and watched her

leave. Halfway across the lobby, she twisted around to look down at her nylon-run leg.

Feeling him watching her, she turned and called, “Go on in, mister. Have a nice time.”

145

5.

Awake in the dark, Donnie gripped the wooden arms of his seat and gazed up at the white

screen. Rita Hayworth was singing. Her large painted mouth spread across the screen.

She does loud things in a soft way, he thought. He wanted to fall into Rita Hayworth’s

smiling mouth.

Put the blame on Mame, boys! Rita Hayworth slid the glove off her arm and

twirled it over her head, bumped a satiny hip to the side, and flung back a waterfall of

hair. Donnie knew from the poster in the lobby that her hair was bright red and the shiny

dress was green. It was a colored poster, though the movie was not, but that was okay

with him. He liked the way Rita Hayworth looked, silvery and shimmery in black and

white.

He stretched his legs out as far as he could, kicking at the seat in front but unable

to reach it. In the back row, a pair of teenagers huddled in a corner under an exit sign

that glared green. The manager had made them come down from the balcony. Gilda was

winding down, Rita Hayworth going off with Glen Ford after he saved her from sinister-

smiling George McReady.

Sometimes the girl in the back row gave a high giggle and, once, during The

Treasure of Sierra Madre, she began to cry. The girl’s hysterical weeping, which Donnie

found difficult to distinguish from her laugh, and her boyfriend’s murmured responses,

seemed to blend with Walter Houston’s whooping in the desert as the winds bore the

robbers’ gold away. Nevertheless, Donnie felt obliged to turn, stand from his seat, and

direct a sharp “Ssssshh!” toward the back of the theater.

Later, when he walked to the lobby for his last box of Milk Duds, the couple

seemed to be at peace. They were occupying the same seat, she almost hidden from

Donnie’s view, the young man turned completely around. All Donnie could see was the

large golden “M” on the back of his dark green jacket.

When the lights came up, the couple was gone. During intermission, a woman, teenaged

girl, and slightly younger boy walked down the aisle and sat three rows in front of

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Donnie. The woman sat between the boy and girl and placed a large shopping bag on

the floor. Donnie recognized the boy as the crossing guard at school. Willy or Wally-

something. He was a couple of grades ahead. He remembered that the boy had a lot of

trouble at first. That was during the war, and no one had seen a real Jap before. His

sister always walked him to school—she must be in high school now—no one ever talked

to them. Now, Donnie knew, the boy was class president and a Boy Scout. He and his

dad had talked about the Scouts, how Jack would be troop leader and help Donnie with

his merit badges, how they would go on camping trips and Jack would teach Donnie

archery and horseback riding, how Donnie would become an Eagle Scout and travel all

over the world helping people.

Every once in awhile the Japanese lady reached into the shopping bag and, eyes

glued to the screen, feel for a sandwich or a piece of fruit. The bag would rustle and the

mother tried to take things out of it during the action parts of the movie. She handed a

sandwich or a chicken leg to the boy or to the girl, and they unwrapped the waxed paper

and chewed slowly, all the while watching the movie. Donnie noticed that the boy

passed his banana peel and uneaten crust to his mother, and she dropped them into the

shopping bag, then handed the boy a napkin. Once, she leaned over and tried to wipe his

face with a handkerchief she wet with her saliva, but he wiggled away.

Edward G. Robinson, who usually played gangsters, was Margaret O’Brien’s

father in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. He was Norwegian and he had an accent.

Donnie thought he made a swell dad. The Japanese boy’s sister looked a little like

Margaret O’Brien. Her black hair was braided on the top of her head and looked like a

crown. She had a long neck and sat up straight in her seat. Like a big sister, Donnie

thought.

He felt wide awake, but he wasn’t following the movie. He couldn’t get Chester’s

look that morning out of his head. What had he said? “The Loop? The place with the

painting?” It was the way he said it, the look on his pudgy face. Donnie had wanted to

punch him out, but he hadn’t known it then. He was only realizing it now.

He wanted to do lots of things. Punch out Kathleen and her salesman friend, who

was coming to get him in his new car. Punch out Chester and Chester’s mom and

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Chester’s father, who was never ever home either, because he was working double shifts

at the stockyards. He hated the warm smells that came out of Mrs. Dalrymple’s kitchen,

the Irish stew smells and stuffed cabbage smells and the Thursday night spaghetti and

meatballs smells. Who did they think they were? He’d throw the big plate of spaghetti

against the wall and watch the noodles squiggle down the wall like red worms. Then

he’d smash the water glasses one by one on the floor the way the Russians did in the

Greta Garbo movie, except they did it against the fireplace. He’d point his finger at his

father but this time it’d be a real gun; he’d shoot and shoot, and he’d cackle like James

Cagney while Jack lay in a pool of his own blood, eyes glazed with surprise. Jack would

never smile again and he’d never ever tell any more lies.

Then Donnie began to think about the Japanese boy who was sitting three rows

ahead and was the crossing guard at school. Donnie thought about how he had wanted to

say something to him when everyone was giving him a bad time, but it was hard to talk to

an older boy and, anyway, maybe he didn’t understand English. He didn’t know then that

the boy and his sister had been born in America and that only the mother talked funny.

Still, that lady had brought the food in the shopping bag. She had tried to wipe the boy’s

mouth with her hanky. Donnie was beginning to wish he had a piece of chicken or a

sandwich from the shopping bag. There were treasures in there. When the mother

started peeling an orange, sweetness filled the air.

6.

Kathleen’s potential had faded with her looks, and the men became older and coarser.

Some didn’t keep up the pretense. Jack called on Donnie’s birthday, Valentine’s Day,

and Christmas for a few years. Sometimes there was music and bar talk in the

background. There were flowers and candy—once, at Easter, a basket of baby chicks.

The calls stopped during Don’s sophomore year of high school. Maybe even Jack began

to hear how loudly he blustered, how hollow his words echoed.

He’d understand when he was older, his parents had promised. He knew that was

just a thing to say, but, in a way, they’d been right. He was fifty-six now, living on the

West Coast. It’d been a long time since he thought of the old neighborhood, of his old

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man—dapper Jack and his ways—of his mother and hers. He’d even learned something

about Rita Hayworth in a book a few years back.

“Men thought they were going to bed with Gilda,” she’d told someone. “But they

woke up with Margarita Cansino.” She’d been a plump, insecure girl in her father’s

Spanish dance troupe, but when she was discovered, her impossibly low hairline altered

and her dark hair dyed flame red, she became an American goddess. She had a kind of

flamboyant innocence, a gorgeous radiance. Later, she became unknown, even to herself.

When he was a child, his mother had been as desirable as any movie star he’d

ever seen. His father, too, had for a time maintained a series of successful gestures,

something another book had said of another failed hero. Funny, his father’s look-alike,

Alan Ladd, had played Jay Gatsby in the movies. That had been back in ’49, when he

still thought his father was better than Alan Ladd. The Great Gatsy and Chicago

Deadline, where Alan plays a hard-boiled reporter, had been a double bill at the Uptown

on Broadway and Lawrence.

The big theaters looked like palaces then. Marble columns and chandeliers,

velvet drapes and paintings in gilded frames, fountains and goldfish ponds. The Chicago

and Oriental Theatres, the Uptown and the Riviera, the Paramount, the Pantages, the

Orpheum, Radio City Music Hall, Grauman’s Chinese. Worlds away.

He and his parents had gone to the movies, lived them, he supposed. But when

the feature and the stage show were over, even if they stayed a couple of times around,

they’d go back to two-and-a-half rooms next to the elevated tracks, with a shared

bathroom down the hall. Still, he’d never gotten over the habit of watching movies, or of

dreaming in the dark.

He’s a projectionist now for the Miracle revival chain. He lives in a room over

one of the theaters, eats at the Roosevelt Café downstairs, and browses in Cinema Books

next door. He’s worked most of the festivals—Vancouver, Sundance, Seattle, even

Toronto. Once, Cannes.

Rita Hayworth died of Alzheimer’s disease a while back. Her daughter, Princess

Yasmin, hosts a Rita Hayworth Gala every year for the Alzheimer’s Association. He

volunteered once, and flew to Chicago at his own expense to run the film Gilda. Her

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other daughter, Rebecca, by Orson Welles, was last reported to be living in the Pacific

Northwest.

Kathleen Robyns never remarried. She was struck by a subway train at nine

o’clock on a spring evening. She was forty-seven years old. The small article in the

Tribune his mother’s neighbor sent said that she’d fallen from the platform while

struggling with a homeless man who’d grabbed her purse. In the pocket of the jacket the

police returned was a ticket stub from the Chicago Theatre. It was marked for the last

matinee, before the prices changed. From the time of death reported, Donald guessed

that his mother had sat through the feature twice. She had long ago cut her shoulder-

length hair, which had, when he’d last seen her, faded to gray.

In the projection booth, Donald watches a tiny figure ride into the dusk. In the

distance, beyond the rider’s reach, a boy shouts, “Shane. Come back, Shane.”

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SMOKE

Evening descends thick and yellow over the Pacific Coast Highway and smears of neon

create a lambent glow along the strip of motels and bars.

The night is young and you’re so beautiful. A man hums a tune, slaps Old Spice

across his cheeks, under his armpits. Tonight, tonight . . . Something might change his

life. Miles away, a woman squints into her bathroom mirror, wielding a mascara wand.

She hopes for something good, even lasting. Tonight, will it be tonight?

Beyond the coastal strip, the ground inclines toward the Pacific, where the

desiccated palms and overgrown bougainvillea obscure a row of stucco bungalows. In

their heyday, World War II, they had served as honeymoon cottages for hundreds of

servicemen shipping out from Long Beach Harbor a few miles to the north. Convenient.

Efficient. Makeshift. Who was keeping track? It was wartime. There was youth and

there was urgency.

Rosie Nomura, who’d once been young and urgent, lives in bungalow C and

watches the waning of days. The property had belonged to a Greek immigrant when

Rosie moved in and worked off her rent with maid work. World War II made Gus

Kazanapolous a millionaire. The next owner painted the stucco a bright tomato red. His

wife had thought up the “cute idea, honey,” of naming the complex “Honeymoon Haven”

and hanging sheer white curtains with red-flocked hearts in the windows. A discount

special was announced for Valentine’s and other holidays. By the time of the last

owner’s tenure, the bungalows were painted a goldenrod yellow which, when the peeling

paint below bled through, gave the bungalows a diseased and pock-marked sand-blasted

look.

The highway strip had changed as well. Gone was Luigi’s Italian Village, whose

owner strolled among the tables playing Neapolitan love songs on his squeezebox. Gone

were date nights at the Rollerama, where couples skated to the music of a giant Wurlitzer

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left over from silent movie days. Gone too was the Rising Phoenix Restaurant with its

ninety-nine cent chop-suey special, pink gin fizzes, and dance marathons. The

demographics had also changed. There were no longer “Whites Only” signs. The best

color was the color of money.

From big band to boogie-woogie, from bop to rock, from amateur nights to

topless bars and the watered-down drinks of happy hours, Rosie Nomura and the oft-

named bungalows of the Pacific Coast Highway had lived on.

By 1990, the buildings are owned by the State of California, occupied by indigent seniors

and their dependents. Rosie lives with the twenty-year-old grandson she has raised since

he was dropped off, “temporarily,” by his mother. Rosie’s daughter Linda had gone to

see a double feature on the Long Beach Pike and called collect six days later from

Bellingham, Washington, to tell her mother that she had signed on as mess cook for an

Alaskan fishing boat.

Gratitude and promises had infused Linda’s first letter: “Thanks, Ma . . . when I

get on my feet . . . regular payments.” Three twenty-dollar bills had floated to the floor.

From time to time she wrote, usually one-page letters on lined paper ripped from a steno

pad, sometimes sending a snapshot—standing on the bow of the “Salmon Spirit,”

wearing mukluks in Fairbanks, posing in front of the Russian Orthodox Church in Sitka.

For a couple of years she sent birthday cards to the boy, DD, the kind in which the sender

inserts coins, and at Christmas, clothes and toys. The last envelope was postmarked

Juneau. The letters stopped when DD was eight.

Three photographs hang in the bungalow. A ten-year-old girl balances

precariously on pink toe shoes. Her pretzel-thin arms lift into an arc; her shiny tiara tilts

slightly on her head. She smiles so hard her eyes are hard, black slits. A snapshot of the

same child as a sullen-looking adolescent hangs a few inches away—bouffant hair, white

gleaming lips, ochre-lined eyes. The photo has been torn and Scotch-taped together, the

ends not quite matching, so that the diagonal line that cuts across the face of the young

woman places one eye slightly higher than the other. The mismatching of the parts of the

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face, features slightly askew, gives the photograph a feeling of existing between static

states. It has captured the fleeting moment between one form of being and the next,

unknown and unpredictable, on the verge of change. The once transparent tape has

clouded and lost some of its adhesiveness; a curled end peels off the nose of the sullen

young woman.

The third photograph is of the child DD on a department store Santa’s lap.

Dressed in a red and white striped T-shirt, navy-blue shorts, and salt-water sandals, he

looks minuscule against the wooly white beard and red suit. Black hair tumbles across

his forehead. His eyes, round and rimmed with thick lashes, look into the camera. His

skin is shiny and golden, his child’s face lit with excitement. He holds a shovel and pail

his grandmother has just bought him. This is Southern California. They will go to the

beach after the picture with Santa.

Tacked to the wall above Rosie’s television set is another picture, the ragged-

edged cover of Life from which Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the

Armed Forces of the United States of America, looks out. Famous grin swiped across his

mobile Kansan face, Ike is resplendent in his multi-medalled uniform. Rosie had named

her grandson after the American hero on the cover of Life: Dwight David Sakamoto

Gonzalez—because DD is half Mexican-American, half Japanese-American and has

never seen his father, because Rosie talked her unmarried daughter into keeping the baby,

and because Alex Gonzalez was MIA in Vietnam.

Rosie’s black and white TV is tuned to the American Movie Channel, the sound turned

up to a decibel above the din of highway traffic. She nods off, then jerks awake, stirred

by the roar of the MGM lion. After a few seconds of blank staring at the screen, she

slumps back to the dreamy landscapes of memory.

In the pantry-sized kitchen, Dwight opens a dented tuna can from the Chicken of

the Sea warehouse where he lifts, wheels and unloads cartons of tuna fish, salmon, and

sardines. Ginger Rogers, a six-toed orange tabby who roams the housing project, leaps

through the window and winds herself around his ankles.

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“Shit, cat!” The tuna fish can slips from Dwight’s fingers.

Ginger Rogers leaps on the counter and licks the oily tiles. She knocks against a

pile of dishes stacked in the sink and a slice of half-eaten toast falls mutely to the floor.

Dwight plucks Ginger Rogers from the counter and opens the screen door. He

lights a Marlboro and sits on the paint-chipped steps with the cat on his lap. He takes the

folded envelope from his shirt pocket with the return address of The White House. He

unfolds the letter he had taken from the mailbox the day before, handling it with the tips

of his fingers, as if it was a fragile document. He looks at the check. He’s read the

amount a dozen times since he tore open the envelope addressed to his grandmother. The

amount is always the same: twenty thousand dollars. The words of the letter are always

the same:

A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase

painful memories . . . justice . . . restitution . . . sincere apology. . . .

You and your family have our best wishes for the future.

The closing—“Sincerely”—and signature—“George Bush”—do not change. The blue

and gold Presidential seal floats against the white paper. The envelope, returned to his

shirt pocket, burns against his chest.

The sun has finished slipping off the rim of the earth and day is plunged into

night. Dwight strokes Ginger Rogers, blowing smoke rings into the stagnant air. When

the yellow VW glides next to the curb, he flicks away his cigarette and walks toward the

driver.

“Alone in the dark, Mister?”

“Hey.” He leans into the open window and kisses his girl.

Cherie’s flaxen hair is still wet and smells of lavender shampoo. She’s on the way

to her shift and is wearing her student nurse’s uniform. She opens the glove compartment

and removes a sheaf of papers.

“Sign. Now.” Under the street light, tiny golden hairs glisten on her arm. “You

know it’s the best thing, D.”

“I know.”

“They’ll take care of her.”

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“Sure.”

Dwight takes the pen from Cherie and slaps the forms on the roof of the car.

When he returns them to her, she murmurs in a Marilyn Monroe voice, “and she’ll have

movies every night, Mr. President.” He laughs as she drives off, waving her fingers out

the window.

Inside the bungalow, Rosie hears the Inkspots. The tenor trills:

They say some day you’ll find All who love are blind . . .

She’d made the emerald green satin gown from a Vogue pattern after seeing Gilda at the

Roxy. Except Rosie’s isn’t strapless. She had stapled hundreds of tiny rhinestones on

thin spaghetti straps until her fingers bled. But now, she thinks, the adamantine sparkle

on her shoulders almost makes up for not having Rita Hayworth breasts.

The gown’s thigh-high slit is meant for movie star legs. Hers are plump and

slightly bowed, but they wear the silk stockings her mother had saved and never worn.

One of her mother’s first jobs in America had been working on a movie starring Anna

May Wong. At the end of the shoot, Miss Wong had given black silk stockings to all the

seamstresses. Rosie’s mother, Chio Nomura, from northern Hokkaido, never got over

how in America there was cordiality, even friendship, between Chinese and Japanese.

Chio had put away the scarlet box on which the shiny black letters “Schiaparelli”

were embossed. “Too good for me. Save special some day,” she had told another

seamstress. The special occasion that never came.

It is 1944 now, and wartime. The silk stockings, a faded photograph of Chio as a

picture bride, and the carpet bag she had brought to America are all that Rosie has of her

mother. The stockings had waited in their scarlet box for eighteen years, almost as long

as Rosie has been alive.

She picks up a stocking and slides her hand into its smooth interior. When she

fits it over her foot, she extends her leg, pointing her toes like Marlene Dietrich in

Shanghai Express. Slowly, she slithers the fabric up her leg. When it reaches her thigh,

she fastens the top of the stocking to the clasp that dangles from her garter belt.

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The movie actress Bette Davis has started the Hollywood Canteen, where stars

mingle with soldiers and sailors and fly boys from Kankakee, or Fargo, or Little Rock,

all-American boys with names like Jim, George, and Frank. Their forebears had come

from Ireland and Sweden, maybe even France, Italy, or Spain. All that way for their

grandsons to dance with, to be served coffee and cookies by Judy Garland, Frances

Langford, or the divine Hedy Lamarr. Sons of other immigrants avoid the Hollywood

Canteen, unsure of their welcome.

Along the Pacific Highway strip, the G.I. Joes are Chinese, Filipino, Mexican,

Negro. The Nisei boys are new— 442nd Regimental Combat Team, out of basic training in

Mississippi, waiting for orders to ship out. Their fathers had named them Makoto, Saburo,

or Hiroshi; they answer now to Mack and Sam and Harry. They are small-boned, smooth-

faced young men, sometimes shorter than the Caucasian girls they are beginning to date.

Their white sergeants and training officers had towered over them.

Splashing “Evening in Paris” behind her ears, Rosie grabs her satin gloves and

hurries for the trolley. The War Bond Dance at the Rising Phoenix is the special

occasion her mother had dreamt of, had saved her special stockings for.

You must realize Smoke gets in your eyes

She stirs in her chair. Moans. The Ink Spots melt into velvety mist. She’s drooled in her

sleep. Someone leans over her.

“Grandma?” Dwight wipes her chin with the back of his hand.

“Is it you, Sam?”

“It’s DD, Gram.”

“D-Day. I remember when you left me, Sam.”

Dwight balances a plate of tuna fish sandwiches in his palm like a proficient

waiter. He places a rusty TV tray in front of Rosie and sets down the plate. She gums

her sandwich greedily.

“Mail came, Gram.”

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“I know. Bad news telegram.”

He wipes her hands on a dishtowel, brushes the crumbs from her lap. “It came

yesterday, Grandma. I have to tell you something, so listen, okay?” He kneels beside her.

“Obasan?” He uses the Japanese word for grandmother, holds her wrinkled

hands in his large ones. “Wakarimasu?” Do you understand?

Her eyes are bright, directed on his. “Wakarimasu.”

“I did something bad, Grandma.” He watches her carefully. “I opened your letter.”

He takes the letter and the check from the envelope. He reads her the President’s

words, tells her that the earlier President before had signed the bill—her eyes flicker at

the words, “Ronald Reagan”—but that the letter is from the one in office now.

“Wakarimasu,” she says. Her gums are bright pink. She’d left her dentures out

so long they no longer fit. “Lonnie Lay-gun.”

Dwight knows the movie-star name reaches into her memory, but not the name of

the current man in office. Forty-four years, Dwight tells her. Remuneration. Apology.

“They say they’re sorry, Grandma,” he says.

“Me too, Sam,” she says.

He tries to tell her the money is hers. Shit—she should’ve gotten more—she’s

been cheated out of everything—Sam’s Army pay because they weren’t married—his

family turning its back on Rosie and her illegitimate daughter. Everyone was gone

now—Sam who’d gone off to war, Chio, who’d come to America to marry a man she’d

never met. His own father had disappeared into the jungles of Vietnam. Did Alex

Gonzalez know he was going to have a kid? Had Sam known Rosie was pregnant before

he shipped off to France?

That’s what I mean, Obasan, he wanted to say—you’re old and I’m the only one

left— and—Jesus—you’re kitchigai. A crazy old lady . . . I know you can’t help it and I

owe you a lot . . . you did your best, I guess . . . but shit, Gram. What’s the use, what’s

the use? It’s my future, and you don’t have one.

“I gotta go.” His fingers close around her frail wrists. “Wakarimasu? Don’t you

see? I have to go, Grandma.” He shakes the wrinkled hands. She twists in her chair,

coy and smiling, like a child trying to avoid a scolding.

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“Say it’s okay—you would if you were in your right mind—you’d give it to me,

say make a life for yourself, DD. Can’t you say that, can’t you say it, you crazy old

woman? You won’t need it where you’re going. They’ll take care of you—your rice

and your miso soup and your movies. Better than me. Say it’s okay—I should have it—

goddamn it, what the hell, you’re batty . . . always were . . . I was always ashamed of

you. You never knew what was going on. My whole life you never gave me what I

wanted. You’re old, and we’re young, don’t you get it? Shit, what’s the difference?

Pretty soon, you’re not even going to remember me. I’m just taking off before you kick

the bucket, before anyone else leaves me behind—you get it, you crazy old witch?

Because I hate you, because I won’t be here when you forget me . . .” He drops his head

in her lap and weeps.

Rosie strokes his hair and watches the television screen. Dwight wraps his arms

around her waist. The letter lies wrinkled in her lap, the check floats to the floor.

The room is dark except for the illuminating screen, the volume turned low. The

traffic above, the waves below, the murmur of voices from the television set and

Dwight’s sobs are sound effects on a surreal stage. Finally, calm settles over him, an

emptiness, and he slowly stands and turns on the lamp. Reaching to the floor, he

smoothes out the check, turns it over, and places it on the T.V. tray.

“Will you sign this, Grandma?” He takes the ballpoint pen out of his shirt

pocket. “It’s only paper.”

“It’s only a paper moon?” She laughs, a young girl.

When I walked into the Rising Phoenix, the Artie Chan Orchestra was playing

“It’s Only a Paper Moon” . . .

“I can’t remember the words, do you?” she says.

Dwight presses Rosie’s fingers around the pen. “No I don’t, Gram. How’s it go?”

Rosie hums, dips her head from side to side.

“Can I have your autograph, madam?” He steadies the T.V. tray as she scribbles

her trembling script.

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Rosie gyrates her satin-wrinkled hips. Her face is owlish from smudged mascara and

shines with perspiration. One elbow-length glove slithers down her arm and pools at her

wrist. She tears it off her hand and swings it over her head. Her partner pulls her toward

him.

“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me” ends and couples slow

dance to “I’ll Be Seeing You.” She and the soldier dance cheek to cheek. He whispers in

her ear, and they run across the dance floor. They laugh at his friends catcalling after them.

The white balcony glows in the moonlight. Everything glows tonight, Rosie thinks.

“Smoke?” She wishes he’d light two cigarettes in his mouth like Paul Henried for

Bette Davis in Now Voyager. A piece of cigarette paper sticks to his lower lip.

“Okay,” she says, and draws on the Pall Mall he lights for her.

“You from here?” he asks.

“Long Beach. You?”

“Hood River.”

“Where?”

“Up in Oregon.”

“Oh.” They smoke in silence, suddenly shy, their security the cigarette they pass

between them.

Sam tries again. “How come you’re not in the camp?”

“I am. I mean, I’m not. I mean I just got out. I’m going to Chicago.”

“How come?”

“You can leave camp if you go east. Have to have a sponsor. My aunt’s friend got

her and me jobs at the Edgewater Beach Hotel.”

“Sounds like a high-tone place.”

“I’m just going to work in the linen room.” Rosie pulls on her glove. “But it gets

me out of the camp.”

Sam nods. “My folks are in Heart Mountain.”

“Where’s that?”

“Wyoming.” He inhales, releases a stream of smoke through his nostrils. Looks up

at the sky. “Nice moon.”

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“Maybe we can’t have the moon, but we can have the stars.”

“Huh?”

“Now Voyager,” Rosie says.

“What’s it mean?”

“It’s when they can’t be together because he’s married. So Bette Davis says,

“That’s okay, Jerry. Maybe we can’t have the moon, but we can have the stars.”

“I like that,” Sam says. He flicks the cigarette into the dark. Sparks fly off the tip.

Rosie follows its trajectory. It reminds her of fireflies.

Sam has edged closer and puts his arm around her waist.

“I like that very much.”

He begins to pull at the fingers of her glove. Hand over hand, he draws her to him.

She notices the cleft in his chin and that his eyebrows almost meet in the center. He kisses

her and she wonders if the tobacco paper will be transferred to her lower lip. When he

presses his body to her, one of the straps of her gown twists. The tiny, fake stones cut into

her skin. The Artie Chan Orchestra plays “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and Sam keeps

pressing and pressing.

Later, they park on the beach in Sam’s cousin’s Studebaker, passing Seagram’s and

PallMalls between Harry Sakamoto and a Chinese girl named Mabel.

“Ooh, I love that,” says Mabel. “Turn it up, Harry.”

They all sing “Rum and Coca-Cola” to the Andrew Sisters on the radio.

Sam’s cousin Harry had won the Studebaker in a crap game in Kansas City the first

day of their leave. Sam tells Rosie that he had been raised on his uncle’s orchard near the

Hood River. The day after Pearl Harbor the cousins had driven to the recruitment center in

Portland, Oregon, in Harry’s old pick-up truck. “We don’t take Japs,” they were told. Sam

grinds out his cigarette in the ashtray.

Now, a year-and-a-half later, they’re shipping out to the front, he tells Rosie. The

European front.

“Oh pweeze, Mr. Pwesident, don’t send me a-cwass the bad Pa-shific.” Harry’s

Bugs Bunny voice shoots out from the back seat.

“Pppp-weeze, Mr. Woosevelt. Don’t send us to Jjj-ap-land,” Sam responds.

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“Don’t shoot my pwetty Budda-head off.”

“You can’t tell us a-paart.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” says Mabel.

“That’s cuz you’re w-w-wearing the ssss-tar of China on your sweeve, baby doll,”

says Harry. “Oh pwetty pweeze, don’t shoot the good ones. Charlie Chan say so, Number

One Son say so, Ching-Chong pretty girl say so.” He juts out his upper front teeth and

squints his eyes.

“Oh, you,” says Mabel, pinching his cheek. She slugs back a swallow of Seagram’s

and passes the bottle to Harry. They stumble out of the car and walk toward the water’s

edge. White caps lap the shore.

Sam moves Rosie to the back seat. He unhooks her silk stockings and slides his

hand between her thighs. Couples pass in front of the windshield, their cigarette tips

glowing in the dark.

Whiskey and cigarettes and the back seat of a Studebaker. It was his cousin’s,

what’s his name, the one who came back. Henry . . . Harry. Lucky Henry or Harry. The

car didn’t have no air, it was full of smoke. Sam’s whiskers was rubbing my face raw—we

didn’t laugh when our teeth knocked together—we was such in a hurry. My clothes all

tangled—the slit skirt ripped up to my fanny and Mama’s silk stockings tore up—the back

seat covered with rhinestones. What’s that sound? Oh, it’s me. Why am I crying? Can’t

stop, don’t know why I’m crying, I told him, don’t know. It’s okay, he said. He was nice.

Don’t worry, I’ll come back. The windows were fogged up. It was different from the

movies. Is this what it’s like? I thought. Is this what it’s supposed to be? I just kept on

crying.

Dwight stands in the doorway of his room. Rosie has slept on the living room floor for

fourteen years, folding her mat and quilt every morning and storing them in the closet. She

had kept her belongings in four drawers of a cabinet, while Dwight’s room filled with toys,

video games, comic books, sports equipment, posters, banners, his guitar. Now he’s trying

to decide what will fit into a VW bug. He’s stuffed his clothes in an duffel bag and a bulky

suitcase. His mother had taken most of the luggage years before.

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He looks at Mrs. Sumida’s books from Bungalow D—he’d helped her move to

Nisei Manor two years earlier. She liked to talk about the camps, repeating herself.

“Some young New Jersey soldiers came to take us. Helmets and bayonets, but they

were nice boys. They had never seen an Oriental person before, can you imagine? It was

hard because my husband and brothers were taken right away by the F.B.I. one, two days

after Pearl Harbor. Guess what? They came for us on April Fool’s Day. But the New

Jersey boys carried our baggage, even our kids, to the army trucks. Take only what you

can carry, the orders said. My little girl, she was eight, and my boy, my Bobby, was three-

and-a-half. He cried and cried because we had to leave his new puppy behind. One of the

soldiers picked up the dog and petted it as we pulled away. He looked like he was going to

cry too.”

Ginger Rogers had squeezed through a tear in the screen. “Hello, you tiger lady,

you,” said Mrs. Sumida. She slid her walker toward the kitchen to pour her a bowl of milk.

They were nice young men, just like you, Dwight, helping me on another moving day.”

“Shikataganai.” It can’t be helped. She patted him on the shoulder.

“We were luckier than most, because our Norwegian neighbors kept our strawberry

farm going. But lots of people lost everything. We went to Manzanar, in the Sierra

Nevadas. Breathtaking view. Majestic really. Guess what? A famous photographer,

Ansel Adams, was taking pictures up in the mountains. Did you study him in school?

Well, when Ansel Adams heard there was a concentration camp down below, he came

down and took pictures. Very nice man, very quiet. Hold on, Dwight. I have something

for you.”

She slid her walker through the parlor and disappeared into her bedroom.

Dwight waited impatiently among the boxes and trunks and suitcases that were to be

divided between Mrs. Sumida’s room in Nisei Manor and the Salvation Army. He heard

the slamming of cupboard and closet doors and the skidding of her walker; the old

woman’s search seemed to take forever.

“Don’t worry,” she called, “I put it somewhere safe for you.” He only wanted the

twenty bucks she’d promised him; he hoped she wouldn’t forget. Finally she returned,

balancing a stack of books on her walker.

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“This famous photographer was taking pictures in the mountains.” She was

repeating herself. Dwight wanted to get the hell out of there and have a smoke. Ginger

Rogers meowed and slunk along the walls, begging for more to eat. He wanted to throw

the cat against the wall, to grab the old lady’s purse, and keep running.

She pried open one of the books with stiff fingers and showed Dwight a black and

white photograph of barracks set against snow-capped mountains, the American flag

waving in the foreground. She closed the book and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said, holding the book at his side like an obedient schoolboy.

The second book was another coffee table-sized volume. The color photograph

on the cover was of an older man holding up a child, probably his grandson, to touch a

name, a minuscule among other minuscules of brightly carved names staring out from the

polished black stone. The book was called The Wall.

“Your Daddy’s name’s might be up there. Maybe some day you’ll go look; they

show you how to find them. It’s a wonderful place. Asian girl designed it, Chinese, I

think. I go many times, because my son is up there.”

Dwight thought of the little boy who had cried for his dog, of the soldier who had

stood in the road petting it.

She had remembered to pay him his twenty dollars and had also given him a worn

paperback, The Best and the Brightest. “Take, Dwight. Learn.” She had pounded her

walker on the floor and laughed brightly. Startled, Ginger Rogers scrambled through the

tear in the screen.

He hasn’t read any of the books Mrs. Sumida had given him. He tosses them into

a cardboard box with his high school textbooks. He looks around. Videos. Transistor

radio. A James Dean-like red windbreaker. The black leather motorcycle jacket for his

sixteenth birthday. Penknives, comic books. A fishing rod. The Encyclopedia

Britannica the salesman talked Rosie into buying on time. Dwight begins to pack.

Outside, Cherie honks the horn.

Rosie has fallen asleep on the couch, sitting upright, her hands in her lap, her head

drawn back, mouth open. Dwight gently shakes her shoulder.

“Gram.”

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“No. No, no.”

You jumped into the machine gun nest. What for? How come? Save the Texas

Battalion, be a hero. You promised to come back. You got a medal. I got a letter from

Harry. No return address. They gave your medal to your mother he wrote. In the camp.

Topaz? No, that was me. Gila River? Heart Mountain? They opened up the gate and

the general came through, and he gave Sam’s mother his medal. You can be proud, the

general said. What about me? We were going to have the moon and the stars. I went to

Chicago and worked at the hotel Auntie Emiko’s friend found us. Famous people stayed

there. The music floated down to the linen room from the Marine Dining Room. I’d stop

the mending machine and listen.

When Auntie found out she said I was cheap, I had to leave. Good thing your

mama’s dead, she said, the shame would kill her. Don’t have it, they said—the pills

made me throw up—then they said don’t keep it. But it was my Linda. The nurse said

her name meant pretty. Like Linda Darnell. I tried to raise her right, I tried. But she

became cheap too. Who is father? I asked her. What color is it going to be? Gonzalez!

What kind of name is that? Where is Vietnam? Give him a good name I told her, give

him a name your daddy would want. I don’t care she screamed, so I named my DD. He

calls me Gram. I will always take care of you, Gram, he says. Sam promised too. We

had true romance. It was love. Some stories are sad, like Loves of Carmen, like Blood

and Sand. We can’t have the moon. We only have the stars.

Cherie holds the screen door and Dwight leads Rosie out of the bungalow.

“Maybe she’ll see Mrs. Sumida there,” he says.

“I checked,” says Cherie. “She died in March.” Dwight had always meant to

visit her.

“Oh, pretty like Lana Turner,” Rosie says, as Cherie fits the seatbelt around her.

Cherie laughs when Rosie strokes her hair.

Daiji No Tame Ni. “For the sake of our precious elders.” The fountain at the

entry of the nursing home had been donated by a famous Japanese American sculptor.

The social worker greets them, introduces Rosie to Jane, a volunteer, who leads the way.

Cherie follows, carrying a box of Rosie’s belongings.

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Dwight stops at the office and signs papers. In the section that asks for income

other than Social Security, he writes “none.” His forwarding address is the hospital

Cherie will be working at in Portland, Oregon.

Dwight walks to Rosie’s room. Her bed is in the corner of a large room she shares with

seven other women. “Home Sweet Home” is embroidered in English and Japanese and

hung on one wall in a lacquered frame.

“Is this it?” he asks.

“It’s the welfare section,” says Cherie.

He fingers the light blue curtain that encircles Rosie’s bed. It reminds him of a

shower curtain, and he pulls it open all the way.

“Kind of small.”

“At least she’s got a window,” says Cherie. She’s placed geraniums on the sill,

hung Rosie’s clothes in a metal locker, and labeled her possessions. The three pictures

from the bungalow are framed and arranged on the nightstand beside the bed.

Rosie sits up in bed, propped by pillows. She looks with equanimity at her surroundings.

Cherie sits on the edge of the bed, holding her hand. She tells her that lunch will be soon.

“Okey dokey,” Rosie says.

“You’ll be eating in the dining room. It’s very nice.”

Marine Dining Room. It was grand. We kept the linens so white and starched.

Jane and another volunteer enter with three of the women who are Rosie’s

roommates. Rosie brightens.

“Bye, Gram,” says Dwight.

“Bye again, Sam,” says Rosie.

Outside, he sits on the edge of the fountain and smokes, waiting for Cherie to

bring the car around. When she parks beside the curb, he slides into the passenger side

and buckles his seatbelt. The Volkswagen begins to pull away.

“Hold on, okay?” says Dwight. He unbuckles his belt, lifts the carpet bag out of

the back seat, and unzips the inside pocket.

He runs into the building and down the hall. His grandmother’s room is empty.

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“She’s in the rec room, watching TV,” Jane says. “Would you like me to take

you?”

Dwight shakes his head. “I just forgot something.”

In Rosie’s room, he tears out a deposit slip from her bankbook and writes in the

amount of $20,000. He takes the redress check out of his shirt pocket, unfolds it, prints

“for deposit only” over Rosie’s signature on the back. He strides down the hall to the

Director’s office.

Outside again, he tells Cherie, “Let’s go,” and slides into the passenger seat.

“You okay?” She leans into him. Her lips are cool and faintly scented.

“Love you,” says Dwight.

The for-sale signs are posted at strategic points along the strip. The encyclopedia set, the

leather jacket, and Dwight’s comic book collection go quickly. The guitar and Mrs.

Sumida’s books sit in a box in the back of Cherie’s yellow bug. Dwight had marked the

fishing pole for sale, but it too finds its way to the car, one end sticking out the open back

window.

Ginger Rogers sits on the steps of bungalow C, licking the bottom of her six-toed

foot. Cars glide along the Pacific Highway as the sun drops toward the Pacific Ocean.

When Cherie tunes to the oldies-but-goodies station, the sky is navy blue, the waves lap

below. The Platters sing their honeyed tones.

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HIDDEN IDAHO You walk between the two posts of the new bookstore in your neighborhood. You don’t

know why, they’re not the same, but they remind you of the frame at the airport. Last

year, Sea-Tac, on the way to Boise. Why had you held your breath? You hadn't done

anything wrong.

You set off an alarm when you stepped inside the frame. Your wife had just

walked through. She turned: a look of wonderment. The young couple standing behind

you waited; the woman was holding a baby. The baby laughed and stretched her plump

arms toward you. For a moment, you were the center of attention. You’d created a fuss.

The young black man wearing the airport badge said, “Remove your buckle, sir.”

The silver belt buckle your father had sent you from prison camp, Mexican silver,

hammered by Pueblo craftsmen. He had used all his ration stamps to buy it.

“Oh, Kenji,” your wife said. “That silly thing.”

You took off your belt and put it in the box. The young man waved you through.

A heavyset woman moved a wand across your spread-eagled form. When you bent to put

on your shoes, you saw the hole in your sock, the big toe sticking through like a pale

sausage.

A pilgrimage, the Japanese American Citizens League called it. Your wife

wanted to go. “Forget about it,” you’d said. What would be there but wind and

sagebrush?

“Anyway, I’m going,” she said.

There was a stone wall and the chimney of the guardhouse. They were made of

lava rock; they had lasted. The memorial plaque and a display of photographs under

Plexiglas were new. So was the sign: Hunt Camp 1942-1945. The inmates called it

Minidoka, an Indian name you thought. The barracks had gone to farmers for tool sheds

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and cabins for migrant workers; the hospital had been moved to the foothills of the

Sawtooth Mountains. But the old irrigation ditch still swelled with water, the sagebrush

still grew in clumps, and the dust remained as fine as flour.

The site had seemed small, forlorn. At Manzanar, a white obelisk stretches

toward the sky. Photographed by Ansel Adams, backed by the Sierra Nevadas. Majestic.

Impermeable. Those Californians, they know how to do things. But there you were in

Idaho, you and the others, a group of aging tourists from Seattle or Tacoma, from Eastern

Washington or Bainbridge Island, squinting behind dark lenses clipped on eyeglasses,

clutching cameras with numb fingers, coats lashed by the wind. Your wife wore a

headscarf that made her look eleven years old again. Babushka: an old-fashioned word.

In sixth grade, you’d carried her books, her girlfriends giggling alongside, your

mind racing for something to say. “Sure it’s not too much trouble?” she had asked. Her

cheeks dimpled when she smiled. “It’s on my way,” you lied, and hitched your thumb

into your belt like a movie cowboy. You hoped she would notice your new silver buckle.

When you got to her barracks, her mother invited you in but you fled, running home all

the way, exhilarated. Your barracks was on the other end of camp.

Fifty years later, you had returned. Some people wept and groped for tissues

which the wind snatched, then whirled away. Your wife dabbed at her eyes with the

billowing ends of her scarf. But all you felt was anger that Dunks wasn’t there. Dunks,

who’d argued, fund-raised, organized. Dunks, hooked to tubes on the ninth floor of

Seattle General.

The group returned to Boise, the others boarding a chartered bus to Jackpot,

Nevada, for gambling and the JACL conference. You and your wife took a cab to the

Ikedas, cozy apartment in a retirement community. George and your father had

emigrated from Hiroshima, farmed in Washington together. Ida had been your mother’s

best friend.

Eighty-nine and still sharp. The old man never changes, you thought. He

reminded you of a tough brown root, compact and close to the ground. Ida was still

plump and jolly, but bent over from osteoporosis.

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George talked about farming and the old days. How you could always tell a

Japanese farm by its even rows. How for twenty years he’d farmed in the freezing rain of

Washington state. How, after camp, they’d stayed in Idaho for the sunny skies. He

didn’t mention that he helped save the sugar beet crop during the war, that later he’d been

named Farmer of the Year.

Ida passed around a plate of chocolate macaroons.

“I still got the mildew between my toes, huh, Kenji?” George raised a slippered

foot, his eyes almost crinkling shut.

The wives began to giggle. Macaroon crumbs tumbled down George’s chest.

The women laughed until tears filled their eyes. You liked the way your wife’s cheeks

still dimpled.

“All this time and you’ve never been back?” your wife asked. “But it’s so close

by.”

“What’s to see?” George said.

You sat on their blue-and-gray plaid sofa, a cup and saucer on your knee, and

scanned the photographs that filled the walls and mantle, the framed medals, the gold-

starred banners, a folded flag in a glass case on the sideboard. No grandkids, you were

reminded. They’d lost their boys in the war, one in France, the other missing in action on

the alpine slopes of Italy.

It had been good to be home. You were relieved to find your son-in-law waiting at the

gate and to sit in the back of his Mazda, breathing in its new-leather scent, listening to

your wife’s bright chatter. You watched the evening traffic creep along like steady-

glowing snails. The buildings loomed over you as you entered the Emerald City. The

Smith Tower, tallest building in the West when you were a boy, was dwarfed now by

buildings that took up half a city block. Your mother once wrote her parents that in

America the buildings were so tall they scraped the sky.

Safe in your driveway, you watched your son-in-law extinguish the engine. The

car doors opened, then slammed shut. Your granddaughter ran toward you, autumn

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leaves sticking to the soles of her shoes. Your daughter, pregnant again, followed. “How

was it?” she said, placing a hand in the small of her back. She and your wife walked into

the house arm in arm. Your son-in-law lifted your bags out of the car’s trunk.

Seated at the dining room table, your wife laid out her photographs. The small

memorial. The desolate sign. The lava-rock guardhouse, the sagebrush, the wide sky.

You and she and the others squinting into the camera’s eye. You craved a nap.

“The Huskies are home. Wanna go to the game tomorrow?” your son-in-law

asked, turning on the television.

“Home,” you sighed, and sank into your armchair.

You don’t like the new chain bookstore. This used to be a quiet neighborhood—a small

market for groceries, a drug store, the cleaners, a video store. Mom’s Café opens at

seven for breakfast, closes at three after lunch. All of a sudden there’s a multiplex movie

theater, a fancy gift shop chain owned by a Hollywood star, an expensive “fusion-Asian”

restaurant. The two-story chain bookstore has put the BookMark out of business. You’d

known Mark Moody for twenty-seven years—sports, thrillers, biographies—you liked to

stop in and browse. Lately, since your stomach started acting up, you veered toward the

health and nutrition section. You wish you had your mother’s remedies: pickled plum

and okai, rice porridge. Or her herbal tea, secret ingredients that warmed your insides.

Mark closed his bookstore and moved to Sun City. Nothing stays the same.

Now you’re walking into the new chain bookstore and past those posts and there’s

a shrill, pulsating sound. People are turning. Is it you? You realize your keys are in your

hand and that you're wearing your big belt buckle. You didn’t think these things were

metal detectors. What have you done? You jangle the keys over your head, and point to

the buckle. You wish you hadn’t agreed to come. But you smile and shrug at the blond

woman at the counter. She shrugs and smiles back. “Sorry,” she says. “It’s been doing

that all day.” Behind you, a woman pushing a double stroller triggers another shrill

sound. The blond woman begins her apologies anew.

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You follow a sign and take the escalator to the mezzanine, where you stop for a

fancy coffee. Foam floats across its surface and you wish you had a spoon; underneath,

there’s hardly any substance.

You ascend to the top floor. You walk to where they told you the auditorium is

located and you pull on the handle, but the door is locked. You’re early. You wish you'd

waited for your wife.

“Are you nervous?” your daughter had asked at breakfast.

“It’s only a slide show,” you’d replied, trying to keep the impatience out of your

voice.

“But you have to talk, don’t you?” she said. She patted her full belly. “Is there a

Q & A”?

“Leave him alone. He’ll be fine,” your wife had said.

“We’ll be there for you, Daddy,” said your daughter.

The miscellaneous sounds of your wife’s preparations had ambushed you—her

gargling as she stood at the bathroom sink, the turning on and off of faucets, opening and

shutting of drawers, clicks and clacks of the objects she set on the marble counter. The

clearing of her throat. Her maddening off-key humming. Her hair dryer was a miniature

vacuum cleaner.

You shouted a brief announcement as you sped down the stairs. You heard a

faint, “For Pete’s sake, Kenji!” as you skirted out the front door.

You descend to the floor below. Straight ahead is a section marked Science. You walk

toward it, take down a chunky volume: Complete Guide to Geology and Mineralogy.

The book says it’s the reference choice for the international scientific community. You

look up desert.

“Desert is not a scientific term,” it says.

You set down the Complete Guide and walk to the Children's Section. On the

shelf labeled “Science and Our World,” you come to the Book of Answers. You trace

your fingers across the large yellow letters outlined in blue and locate the chapter on

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deserts. On page 22, it asks: “What are deserts?” Below, in a box, is the answer:

“Stretches of sand as far as the eye can see.” That’s the Mojave, this one’s the Sahara,

you think, picking out the legends under the pictures. What of your desert of scrub and

sagebrush? Your eyes sting at the slight. You take off your glasses and wipe them on

your shirt sleeve.

You sit in a little chair in the Children's Section and turn the pages of the Book of

Answers. There is a picture of a turquoise, the kind that's in your silver belt buckle. Your

turquoise has faded; the buckle cuts into your belly, but you want to show it to the

audience, the people you’ll be facing in forty-seven minutes. If anyone comes. You

want to tell them you've had it for fifty-three years. That your father bought it at the

canteen of his prison camp in Santa Fe, along with beaded moccasins for your mother and

a Pueblo doll for your sister; that when the package arrived it was stamped “Enemy Alien

Mail,” and that you and your mother sat on the steps of your barracks while she translated

your father’s letter. That parts of the letter were blacked out. That you were eleven years

old and it was the first package you’d ever gotten in the mail. That you wore the buckle

to bed. That you hunted for it in the attic before your “pilgrimage” to Idaho last year and

bought a new belt for your widening waist. That you had polished the buckle bright.

That it had set off the alarm at the airport last year and made the posts downstairs scream

this afternoon.

You’re startled by a crackling voice overhead. Storytelling hour is announced on

the loudspeaker. Children and their parents begin to approach. You leave the Children's

Section.

In the Travel Section, you find a book on Idaho. “Pitch your tent on the moon,”

says the back cover. You read once that the moon is an ancient volcanic landscape. That

has stuck in your mind. One night in 1942, your mother stared out at the desert.

Suddenly the moon appeared, large and white, as if it had jumped into the sky. You

remember your mother crying out. “Ah! Ah!” Your little sister stood in the doorway of

the barracks, clutching your mother’s trembling skirt.

Your mother had said your father was away on business and that you and your

sister and she were going on a vacation. When you got to the first, temporary, camp you

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told her: “This is the worst vacation I've ever had.” Back home, after the war, you told

your class you'd been to camp. “What kind?” asked Betsy O'Reilly. “Boy Scout?”

Idaho is off the beaten path, says one book. A place on the way to somewhere

else. Another book promises you out-of-the-world experiences. Climb Seven Devils

Trails, it says. Go on a hiker's pilgrimage, stand at Heaven's Gate Outlook, peer into

Hell's Canyon. “Only a few million years ago,” you read, “there was an almost

continuous cataclysm of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and lava flows.” You like the

sound of “continuous cataclysm.”

Lava flows layered Hells Canyon like a torte, writes the author. You smile at the

idea of a canyon that looks like a torte and you realize you’re hungry. Your stomach

growls. You hope your wife will come soon, that she’ll bring your Tums and a sandwich.

You hope no one has seen your foolish grin or heard your stomach rumble. You try to

concentrate. Fiery lava had seeped through cracks in the earth's crust, then cooled. This

was about fifteen million years ago. The most recent volcanic activity occurred only

2,000 years ago. Time flies.

Ancestors of the modern camel, horse and rhinoceros lived and died in Idaho.

Also, dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats. Yellowstone and the Cascades show the

remnants of volcanism. Pictographs and petroglyphs show evidence of life. You wonder

if there will be any remnants of yours.

You once saw a TV program that said the desert would reclaim itself. You're not

sure what that means, but you remembered it. You remember the Saturday matinees at

the Pantages Theater. But first, you had to stack the berry crates and weed the rows.

Your father always knew when you were flying through your chores. He would pull the

change out of his overalls in agonizing slow motion, then peer into his palm as if

wondering what he would find there. When, finally, you plucked the quarter from his

thumb and forefinger, you sped across the rain-soaked fields.

“What’s hurry, Kenji, huh?” your father shouted.

“Arigato, Otosan.” Thanks Pop, you yelled over your shoulder.

You sped down Pine Hill on your two-wheeler and screeched to a halt in front of

the Pantages. “What kept ya?” Dunks said, having arrived a minute earlier. You sat in

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the dark, a bag of popcorn on your lap, without a care, waiting to be transported to other

worlds. One Thousand Years B.C. Curse of the Cave People. When Dinosaurs Roamed

the Earth.

Shifting sands in an hourglass, pages flying off the calendar. You wonder how

long it takes for a tarpaper barracks to turn into desert. Or a wooden watchtower. How

long until barbed wire or galvanized tin become indecipherable particles of time?

One of the books says that fossils have preserved the colors of leaves and insects.

If you pry open a rock, you may discover an ancient beetle shell, its blue-and-green

iridescence shimmering before your eyes. You've arrived, a million or so years later.

You hold something in your hand that's been perfectly preserved. Exposed, it oxidizes

into oblivion.

You find it on page 89:

The actual site of the Minidoka Relocation Center, known to most

as the “Hunt Camp,” is 20 miles east on Route 25, on the edge of

uninhabitable lava lands. A memorial, overlook and historical

exhibits mark the site.

These are the facts: Hunt Camp is Idaho's newest ghost town. Between 1942 and

1945, nearly 9,400 people lived there, making it Idaho's eighth largest city. Inmates

helped save Idaho’s sugar beet crop when most of the farm labor was fighting overseas.

The guard station was made of lava rock. You remember the guard, a gap-toothed boy

from St. Louis, who had a talking parrot. The bird had encountered so many inmates it

spoke English with a Japanese accent.

Minidoka had the highest military casualty rate of the ten internment camps. One

in ten camp residents served in the United States Army during World War II. Inside, they

grew crops for the war effort. The plots were called Victory Gardens. Eleven of the

families on your block lost sons in France or Italy. George and Ida Ikeda lost theirs in

both France and Italy. The moms were called Gold Star Mothers.

Hunt Camp is seven miles west of Eden, located in the Magic Valley.

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“Slowly and inexorably,” one of the books says, “the two tectonic plates that

make up most of the North American continent drifted toward each other.” You think of

doomed lovers, each on a raft of molten rock, trying to reach the other. Of your mother’s

favorite opera, Tristan and Isolde. Of Duel in the Sun, the forbidden movie you and

Dunks snuck into at the New Pantages after camp. Of how the wild cowboy Luke

seduced Pearl, the half-breed Indian girl; how they shot each other across the canyon and

crawled across rock and sand to die in each other's arms. Jennifer Jones—your father

thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world—and Gregory Peck, Atticus

Finch to your daughter, but forever outlaw Luke to you.

You and Dunks went to your house and shot cap pistols from opposite ends of

your mother's dining room, then crept toward each other on your stomachs. Your shoes

made black ridges in your mother's carpet; you knocked over two chairs and a lamp

before you met cataclysmically under the dining room table. Duel in the Sun. “Oh,

Pearl!" "Oh, Luke!”

In camp, you counted the stars with Dunks, lying on your backs in the desert,

while searchlights made their slow arcs across the grounds. You dangled on the backs of

Army trucks with Dunks, played King of the Mountain on the coal pile on the edge of

camp with Dunks, chased the fifth grade girls through the mess hall with Dunks. Later,

back home, the two of you fought off the white kids in the school yard. Later still, dorm-

mates, best men, fishing pals, golf buddies. Dunks the talker, the doer, the strategy guy.

In recent years, you’d lost touch, moved to the suburbs, agreed to disagree. What’s past

is past, leave it be. Why scratch a scab? You hated a fuss. Diabetes. Heart. He should

have lasted longer.

You’re startled when you hear your name. “Kenji Takahashi.” You tilt your

coffee cup and creamy foam drips on your shoe. You close the books on your lap and

wipe your shoe with a napkin. The voice has mispronounced your name—Tack-a-hashi,

reminding you of corn beef and hash. Nevertheless, you’re to report to the auditorium.

The door is no longer locked.

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When you arrive at the top, a shiny-faced youth tells you he’s set up the slide

projector. You look around the large room. “My friend was supposed to do this,” you

tell him. “He was very good at it.”

The young man tells you they're expecting a full house. A stack of folding chairs

leans against one wall, in front of which a poster rests on a stand. Henry “Dunks”

Shigeno’s photograph grins out at you. His name is covered by a strip of paper on which

your name is written in permanent marker. You have no photograph.

"It's my first time," you say, and finger the box of slides in your pocket. It fits

snugly in your palm and that is reassuring.

“Would you like a run-through?” asks the young man. “There’s time.” The white

screen looms ahead. You walk to the projector and drop each slide into the thin slots of

the carousel.

“Lights, please?” you say, and wait for the dark.

Click. The deck of the America Maru, 1918. Young men waving at the camera. Which

of those earnest faces belongs to your father and his friend, George, labor contracts in

their pocket, worn sea-bags slung over their shoulders? “America, in America/Dollars

grow on trees,” your father writes in his diary. Tanka poetry. “You just reach up and

pick them.”

Click. A line of picture brides outside an immigration office in Tacoma,

Washington, 1921. Which kimono-clad figure is your mother, waiting for the stranger

she had married by proxy on an opposite shore? “Parting tearfully,” her tanka poem

reads. “Holding a one way ticket/I sail far away.”

Click. Three women sit for a formal portrait at their arrival at San Francisco

Harbor, 1923. Your mother’s sister, Mayumi, poses with two school friends. They are

dressed in the bright-colored kimonos of young, unmarried women. A large bow perches

on top of Mayumi’s upswept hair. She sits, holding a folding-fan, halfway open on her

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lap. One friend stands behind her, a delicate hand placed on your aunt’s shoulder. The

other girl carries a silk parasol.

Click. The same young women have returned to the photographic studio a week

later, wearing tube-shaped dresses that end above the knee, silk stockings, and pointed

shoes with enormous buckles. Your aunt’s kohl-lined eyes stare vamp-like under her

spangled headband, giant spit curls coil around her cheekbones. A strand of glittering

beads dangles to her waist. A pout rests on her bee-stung lips.

You blink at the shadows of your past. You click through the slides that in twenty

minutes you will reveal to an audience. You check their order, running through your

mind words that will tell the story of the slides. Will the unknown, then, be known? Will

anyone remember? Will anyone care? You dread the question-and-answer period.

Dunks said that was always the hardest part. “Why did you go?” “How did you feel?”

“Why didn’t you protest?” “Weren’t you pissed?”

Click. You stare at your pre-war self, with Dunks, ages nine and nine-and-a-half.

You’d helped dynamite stumps to clear for strawberries fields. You and Dunks wear

identical shirts, goldenrod yellow with a black zigzag pattern, from a bolt of cloth a

peddler had traded your father for a flat of strawberries. Your mother had made shirts out

of the material for you and Dunks; aprons too, a dress for your sister, and curtains for the

kitchen windows. Later, in Minidoka, your mother sewed the curtains together to make a

long panel to partition the barracks, where eight families lived. Everyone on the block

called yours the zigzag apartment.

Click. The sun beats down. Your mother, father, and three Nisqually Indians

stoop over rows of strawberry plants. You and Dunks stand in the foreground, wearing

your identical shirts. Big shots, brown arms flung on each other’s shoulders, stolid legs

straddling the plantings. You grin into the camera with your young sweaty faces, into the

future with your laughing eyes.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Shirley S. Louis, who writes under the name, Nikki Nojima Louis, has done “poor art”

for over twenty years. She has temped, written grants, received commissions, served as

artist-in-residence in schools, and worked in Northwest regional theater as actor, director,

producer, dramaturg and playwright. She has toured her plays to colleges and

communities throughout the United States. In 2001, she received her MFA in Creative

Writing from the University of Washington, where she received the David Guterson

Fiction Award, then spent what she calls her “gypsy year” in writing conferences and arts

residencies—in Washington, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana,

Massachusetts, and Alaska—before entering the Ph.D. program in Creative Writing at

Florida State University. At FSU, she received the Kingsbury Fellowship, the Marion

Bashinski Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a Dissertation Research Grant.

Publications include a play, Most Dangerous Women, and three stories from her

dissertation.

Nikki spent part of her childhood in two World War II American internment camps. She

has chosen the art of fiction to convey her stories because of fiction’s ability to inhabit

many lives through many approaches to craft and because, as Barbara Kingsolver states

in Animal Dreams, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.”