A Girl Like You (10 page)

“That’s fine, Satomi. You’re grown-up now, I guess.”

After years of wanting it she longs now not to be grown-up, to be instead a helpless child, to have decisions made for her. But even in the face of their need Tamura seems incapable of action. They are running out of everything, living on hen eggs and their dwindling supply of rice.

“At least we still have eggs,” Tamura says disinterestedly.

The hens, though, as if they know Tamura has given up on them, have taken to laying sporadically, and some days not at all.

“Even your cockerel can hardly be bothered to crow,” Satomi says.

“They’re not used to you, that’s all,” Tamura says. “It’s no good just throwing the feed at them, you have to talk to them, encourage them.”

“They want you back, Mama. They’ll start laying again as soon as they hear your voice.”

She herself misses the sweet bell of Tamura’s voice singing the nursery songs of her childhood to her farmyard audience.

Neither of them can bear the idea of wringing a neck or two for the pot.

“Your father always said he couldn’t understand it. Two squeamish farm girls. But I just can’t do it. Those surprised little eyes, their warm feathers. I just can’t.”

“We’re too soft,” Satomi says in despair.

If they needed an excuse not to go to town, it comes in the form of Elena summoning them on the horn of Hal’s truck, calling to them from the passenger seat, the bulk of Hal restless at the wheel.

“Give it a week or two, Tamura. People ain’t making much sense at the moment. You’re better off at home.”

Satomi moves toward the truck. “Can you buy us some rice, some flour, Elena?”

Hal’s face reddens with anger; he puts his foot down on the gas and the pickup starts rolling forward.

“Damn it, Elena, I said you could wave,” he growls. “No way are you gonna do their marketing for them.” He leans across her and begins winding up the window.

“Best you keep to yourselves,” he shouts. “Elena’s got enough on her plate with her own work.”

If it was up to him he’d send them all back to Japan, or better still cull the lot of them. His wife is too soft, her judgment when it comes to their Jap neighbor way off.

As the truck hauls away, Satomi runs to the coop, picks up the nearest hen, and wrings its neck.

In the aftermath of December seventh, the town speaks with one voice. All Japanese are spies or saboteurs. No exceptions. Over the weeks leading up to Christmas, Angelina’s Japanese do their best to hide themselves away. No Japanese child attends school, their parents rely for their meals on their stored supplies and what they can grow. Best to steer clear of Main Street for a while.

Those of the second and third generations begin to question their routines. Perhaps they don’t need to go to their Japanese-language classes with Mr. Sakatani. Japanese is the language of the enemy, after all. Perhaps their mothers should choose fried chicken over sushi more often.

Mr. Beck, lacking drama in his own life and with an audience of white faces before him, is free to fire up his class with his own outrage. His lurid description of what happened at Pearl Harbor, the details he goes into of explosions and of good Christian
Americans innocently saying their prayers that Sunday morning before the attack, thrills his pupils in much the same way that his reading of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” had the year before.
Listen my children and you shall hear …

Their teacher’s righteous fury, his gory descriptions of shrapnel slicing through skin, of human balls of fire, heats their blood, invites them to accept that only Americans can be trusted to act honorably.

With shaking voice he raises his hand and quotes Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

December seventh, 1941, is a date that will live in infamy.

Artie, listening to Mr. Beck’s ravings, suffers a twinge when he thinks that now he has to think of Satomi as the enemy. Mr. Beck has advised him to stay away from her, Japanese blood is Japanese blood, and that’s that.

“If ever there was a time to choose sides, Artie, it’s now,” he counsels, as much to himself as to Artie.

Artie doesn’t want to stay away, though. He wants to tell her that he is sorry for taking the ring back, that he’d just gotten caught up in the action, that she’s not to blame for the attack. He thinks about her all the time, daydreams about running away with her after the war. They could pretend that she is Italian or something, she could get away with that easy. And now that Mr. Baker is dead she needs a guy around, a guy like him.

But he’s in a fix with Lily. According to her they are going steady now, which is odd because he isn’t sure how that came about, how suddenly his class ring is on her finger.

“This is for you, Artie,” she had said, fixing a REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR pin on his shirt. I guess you should let me wear your class ring for the time being. Just so people know you’re not hankering after Satomi. We’ve all got to pull together now.”

“I guess that’s the way to go, at least till things quieten down,”
he had said, handing over the ring, thinking that a week or two should get the message over. But Lily’s showing no signs of handing the ring back, even though he’s given enough hints.

From the moment she trapped him, he’s had to put up with the feel of her pushing up against him, following him around as though they are meant to be together. It’s not doing his reputation any good. She’s no Satomi, and although he’d go there, no way would it be more than once. He’s in a different league than Lily Morton, after all.

Artie rolls his eyes, crosses his fingers, and hopes for the best. But, propelled into war, the town isn’t about to quiet down anytime soon. Along with the rest of America it’s obsessed with Japan, with the nature of the beast that had attacked them. The radio comes at it from every angle, so that no other news gets a look in. Angelina, though, scarcely needs the rest of America’s righteous anger to lend oxygen to the flame of its own fury.

Satomi listens in too, as fascinated as anyone. She doesn’t know how things are going to change for her and Tamura, but she knows enough now to be afraid.

“I don’t want to hear it anymore,” Tamura says, sick at heart. “Keep that crackling thing in your room if you want.”

She does want, needs to be in touch. Her world has narrowed down to the quiet house, the lonely fields. She has the sensation that Tamura is shrinking too. She seems shorter, thinner, the frown lines between her eyebrows deepening by the day.

She feels older herself, an equal to Tamura. If it wasn’t for the sound of the Kaplans’ pickup coming and going, they could believe themselves to be the last people in California.

Without school, without Lily, without town, where is she meant to place herself? Who is she now that Aaron is dead other than a girl with one parent, one Japanese parent?

Aaron’s newspaper still comes in the mail, its pages filled with
eyewitness accounts of the raid, photographs of the destroyed port, of felled sailors. She examines every picture in detail, as though she might find her father somewhere in them among the debris.
I know, I know,
she thinks with her stomach muscles clenching,
something must be done, we must have movement.
Tamura must be pulled back from the edge, they must face town, attempt to live normally.

On a day when long white clouds string the sky and the sun sits hazy in its field of blue so that everything looks new, she gathers up the books Mr. Beck has lent her, and on the pretext of going for a walk heads to the outskirts of town, where he lodges with the pharmacist’s widow in a double-fronted weatherboard.

The old house is less imposing than she remembers it. Yellowing nets droop at the windows, the gate hangs crooked on its broken latch. Weeds crowd the grass so that the once-smooth turf is now more meadow than lawn. Despite its former style, its pretensions, now in its fading there is something of the shack about it. The wavering she had felt at calling on Mr. Beck unannounced slips from her.

Skirting an old incense cedar that leans toward the house at an unsettling angle, she takes the creaking steps two by two, and is assailed by the faint whiff of mold coming off an ancient cane rocker. Just the place for Mr. Beck, she thinks, substantial, but peeling.

Long before her ring is answered, she hears a slow shuffle along the hall, a heavy sighing.

“You wait here, girl,” the widow says. “Sit on the porch if you like.”

She doesn’t sit, she wants to be standing when Mr. Beck comes.

“I’m returning your books,” she says when he does. “I’ve finished with school, no time for it anymore; my mother can’t manage the land on her own.”

“Did you read them all?” he asks, taking the string-tied bundle from her, careful not to let his hand touch hers.

“All but
Little Women
. I never got around to that one.”

“Ah. So what now, Satomi?”

“You tell me, Mr. Beck. Any suggestions?”

“Well, a girl like you wasn’t made for farming, that’s for sure. I’d head east if I were you, before things get worse ’round here.”

“And leave our land, leave my mother?”

“It’s a problem, I can see that.”

Mr. Beck tries not to think about Satomi Baker these days. He’d like his mind to let her go, but you can’t order those things, visceral things, he thinks. At the sight of her the old familiar rhythm in his heart has kicked in, a dull sort of pulling. He doesn’t want to feel it, it’s unsettling, will take him down a dead end, he knows that for sure. He can’t fool himself, though, the cut has been made, and she has somehow been wired into his emotions. He smells the clean scent of her, notes her hands shaking a little. It has taken courage for her to come, but she has overcome her fear. She makes him feel old beyond his years, already on the downward slope.

“Can I ask you something, Mr. Beck?” She hadn’t known that she was going to, or that she cared about his answer.

He pauses, putting his head to one side as though considering.

“I guess,” he says hesitantly.

“I’ve always wanted to know where you placed me in your class.”

“Placed you?”

“Yes, was I white or Japanese to you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Know that I favored you, though.”

“Wrong answer, Mr. Beck.”

“What’s the right one?”

“Wish I knew.”

Some way along the road home she hears him calling and turns, squinting into the sun, waiting for him to catch up with her.

“You should read
Little Women
,” he says breathlessly when he does. “My present to you, no need to return it.” He hands over the book. “If you do read it, though, the answer to your question might be that I think of you as half Jo, half Meg.”

She takes the book and laughs. “Half and half, of course, that’s just perfect. Thanks, Mr. Beck.”

Much as it goes against its citizens’ idea that the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, there is no disguising the fact that the Japanese have come out on top. The attack, lit by the rising sun, planned down to the last detail, had been exquisitely efficient. People can’t sleep easy in their beds anymore. To be American, it seems, doesn’t mean you can’t get your ass whipped.

“They won’t catch us sleeping again,” they brag in Angelina.

“Yeah, chose their time, all right, the sneaky bastards.”

“Can’t call what they did a fair fight.”

But however much they puff themselves up, the realists among them know that it is going to take more than bravado to send those
cocky bastards
to hell. Angelina along with the rest of America is already paying in blood, Aaron’s included.

“Not one condolence letter from anyone in town,” Tamura says. “Not one word of regret for our loss.”

The harsh realization that Aaron’s death is to count for nothing in the judging of them brings with it an anger that Satomi nurtures. Anger feels better than the grief that comes when she is off guard.

At first Tamura refuses to write to Aaron’s parents.

“They didn’t love your father. They chose to lose him years ago.”

“Maybe, Mother, but it’s your duty to let them know. It’s only fair.”

Unable to resist the idea of duty, Tamura writes a single page telling them of Aaron’s death. She says that she feels for them in their loss, but that she will never return to Hawaii herself. Perhaps one day Aaron’s daughter Satomi might.

A few lines come in return. Aaron, they say, has been dead to them from the moment he chose to marry her and disgrace them. They are old now and have no wish to know his Japanese family. They ask Tamura to leave them in peace.

“That’s the end of it,” Tamura says. “It’s what I expected.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mother. You did your duty, that’s what counts.”

They greet Christmas without enthusiasm. Tamura catches a bad case of flu and stops eating again.

“I’ve seen blood on the moon,” she says. “It means that there is worse to come.”

“Well, if there is, we’ll face it together. We still have each other, Mother.”

“Satomi, you do not understand that without a husband a woman has no purpose. There is no dignity in being a widow.”

“There’s dignity in being a mother, surely?”

When Tamura takes a turn for the worse, complaining that she is freezing one minute, burning up the next, Satomi runs to town in a panic and asks for Dr. Wood to call.

“He’s not here,” his wife says. “Babies still get born, Christmas or not. They call him out at all hours.”

“Be sure to tell him when he gets back,” Satomi insists. “My mother is very ill. Tell him it’s urgent.”

“Sure thing,” the woman says, and closes the door on her.

It comes to her later as darkness falls, as her mother’s temperature rises so high that she imagines insects crawling on her blanket, that Dr. Wood isn’t coming.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make you better, Mama. I promise I’ll make you better.”

It’s a week before Tamura rallies and takes a cup of soup, and the last of the sweet dark beans that she likes.

“Sleep and food is what you need,” Satomi says. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

While Tamura sleeps, she walks the mile into town stoking her anger to keep her courage up and raps twice on Dr. Wood’s door.