A Girl Like You (15 page)

“I was looking for my mother,” they wail when caught out.

“It would have been better to have arrived in summer,” Tamura says, stating the obvious as she attempts to light a few sticks of wood in their stove. “It takes time to become accustomed to the mountain weather.”

They are not prepared for the icy air, for the ground set hard as a hammer. The cold thickens the blood, makes movement sluggish. Even the birds hardly sing in Manzanar. They perch rather than fly, in case their wings should freeze and they should fall frozen to the ground.

“We don’t have the clothes for it,” Satomi despairs. “You must use my blanket as a shawl, Mama. Stay inside, your cough is getting worse.”

As the relentless storms rock them, a leftover hoard of Navy World War I peacoats arrive and are issued to every household.

“One for everyone,” they are told. “You see, America cares for you, we have your interest at heart.”

The coats are large, all one size. They are too big for the children, and on the women they trail to the floor and hang over their hands. Made of felt, they sop up the rain, making them too heavy to wear on wet days. It takes a week to dry them out, and the scent of mold never leaves them.

“They’re better used as blankets, I suppose,” Tamura says. “They’re so heavy in the wearing they make my shoulders ache anyway.”

If they didn’t know it already, Manzanar during their first winter confirms to them that nature is boss. The wind howls at them, sucking its breath in, shrieking it out furiously, a mad creature intent on blowing them to kingdom come. It slams at the electricity poles so that the light goes and they have to take to their beds as soon as darkness falls.

It’s bad enough faced straight-on, but they prefer it that way,
even when it blows hard enough to move stones as if they are nothing but bits of cinder. When it charges them from behind, the barracks shake and tilt alarmingly.

“It’s about to go,” is the shout, setting neighbors to help knock in the loose nails, hammer the wood back together. On such occasions something of the atmosphere of a barn-build overtakes the detainees, a barn-build where your fingers freeze and your eyes burn in the whipping wind. A barn-build with no picnic to look forward to.

Satomi, bundled up in her peacoat, which flaps unpleasantly against her calves, wanders the camp, not knowing what to do with herself. People hardly acknowledge her, they are shy to speak to the tall, angry-looking white girl. They have heard that her father died at Pearl Harbor, an American hero, it’s said. So why is she incarcerated here with them? Surely she must hate the very look of them, her father’s murderers. But if that’s the case, then what of her mother, the pretty Mrs. Baker, as Japanese as any of them?

“There’s bound to be trouble when you marry out of your race,” they say. “Bound to be complications.”

On her walks around the camp she lingers by the groups of old Issei men, those born in Japan, who cluster together rubbing their hands and stamping their feet against the cold. They hardly know how to be either, or what to do with their days. They would like to huddle inside but, unable to tolerate the beaten look of their wives, the sense of loss in their families, they prefer to face the deathly cold. Their breath freezes on the air as they crowd around the fires they light in discarded tin cans. They speak of the war in hushed tones, wonder how it’s going, how Japan is faring. Perhaps they never should have left the old country, never should have sired American children. Old loyalties stir in them, they are children of the Emperor, after all. They play
go
, an ancient game with mysterious rules involving black and white stones. The game attracts a
rapt audience of their peers, who squat on the ground watching the stones intently. One old man sketches them as they play, with a piece of charcoal on cardboard, making swift flowing strokes, stopping every so often to blow some heat into his bony fingers. Satomi likes his work, thinks him a genius of the understated.

The veins on the back of the old men’s hands rise thick, dark as bark, to join the burn marks they suffer from getting too close to the red-hot cans.

At first she had watched the matches and, like the old men, she had stood too close to the braziers and burned her hands. But after a while she lost interest. The game moves too slowly to hold her attention for long, and something about the players’ patience seems too accepting to her. The fight has gone out of the old men. It’s worrying.

“Playing games as though everything is normal,” she says to Tamura. “And they hardly seem to notice the cold even though their lips are blue.”

“They notice it, all right, Satomi, but what else can they do to forget their shame? It will be better for them in summer. The air will be sweet, they won’t need their fires. Just think of it, we will be able to leave our door open, to breathe outside without burning our lungs.”

“Some of them might die of the cold before then.”

“Perhaps that is what they hope for.”

Dog Days

Summer, when it comes, is not without its own trials. Rains flood the latrines, so that excrement runs down the alley and bubbles up beneath the barracks, where it settles in thick slimy pools. Drawn to the toxic smell, flies swarm, causing the residents in the Bakers’ row of barracks to name their road “Sewer Alley.”

The children make a game of the infestations, seeing how many flies they can collect. They stack them up in old gallon jugs and empty bottles, any container they can lay their hands on. One boy proudly claims to have collected two thousand of the dirty, dark-bodied things.

With the winter behind them, Sewer Alley is always crowded now with inmates who prefer to live their summer lives outside. Used now to Satomi’s aloof manner, and charmed by Tamura, their neighbors greet them with bows and good-mornings.

Satomi talks sometimes with the girls of her own age in the alley, but she hasn’t made a special friend of any of them, doesn’t want to. Lily’s fickleness has made her cautious. There’s a boy named Ralph a couple of barracks away, whom she often talks with. Ralph’s a freethinker with an irrepressible desire to right wrongs. She likes to listen to him, likes his knockout smile. She’s more interested in his friend, though, her neighbor’s son Haru, whom she can hardly look at, he’s so dazzling, so bright.

Unlike her, Ralph and Haru have chosen to attend the new high school, which is being held in the open on the ground by the mess hall. Books have to be shared, pencils too, and sometimes it’s just too hot to sit on the earth with the sun scalding your head till you feel as though it will split open like an overcooked squash.

“It’s worth it just to learn, though,” Ralph says.

Volunteers are hurrying to finish building the wood and tar-paper block intended to house the students, to keep them from the extremes of the Owens Valley seasons.

“It will be better once we are inside,” Ralph says. “You should come, Satomi. Don’t let them steal your education too.”

“I’ll think about it.” She knows, though, that she won’t. School holds no attraction for her. It would be like returning to childhood, and in the vein of her father she doesn’t care to be told what to do.

She had thought Ralph to be like her at first, half and half, but he turned out to be a different sort of half-and-half altogether.

“I am like you,” he told her. “Only I’m half Mexican, half Irish.”

He doesn’t even have the one required drop of Japanese blood to explain his presence in the camp. It had been his strong feelings of kinship and outrage that had brought him to, and keeps him, in Manzanar.

“I grew up in the Temple-Beaudry neighborhood in Los Angeles,” he tells her. “We were a mixed bunch, Basques, Jews, Koreans, Negroes. It didn’t matter to us, we liked who we liked.”

When Ralph talks it’s like being in the light, Satomi thinks. He’s a special person, sixteen but a man already, not afraid to say what he thinks. He had been a high school student when the order for the Japanese to vacate their homes had come.

“They were my friends,” he says. “They’d done nothing to deserve it. It was unfair and cruel. We were taught the Constitution
at school and we were proud of it. Now it seems like it was all just words.”

Ralph’s mother is dead, and his father, thinking him to be at summer school, didn’t miss him at first. It came as a shock to learn that he had joined the Japanese students, his fellows from Belmont High, as they had boarded the buses to Manzanar.

His sister wrote often after they discovered where he was, pleading with him to come home. Ralph, though, insisted that he wanted to stay with his buddies. Eventually his father gave him permission to remain in Manzanar.

“They must be proud of you, Ralph,” Satomi had said when he’d first told her his story. He had given one of his smiles and shrugged.

Word of his act was hot news for a while in the camp. It’s no wonder, Satomi thinks, that he is so popular, or that he has become a Manzanar celebrity.

“How wonderful that he should do this for us,” it’s said.

“Ralph Lazo will be spoken of long after we are all dead.”

Despite that it’s summer, the dust storms are as promiscuous as ever. There are mornings when they wake in a shroud of grime covering them from head to toe.

“We will make this place ours,” Tamura determines, doing her daily sweep. “If we care for it, we need not feel shame.”

Satomi raises her eyes to heaven, wonders if her mother has gone quite mad.

Their neighbor to the left of them, Eriko Okihiro, Haru’s mother, is of the same frame of mind as Tamura.

“My mother lives with us,” she told Tamura with a wry smile at their first meeting. “I don’t want her to feel ashamed of my housekeeping.”

The Okihiros, all four of them, jostle for space in their barrack, which they have divided in two with a piece of sacking.

“We are two widows, a boy, and a girl,” Eriko explained with pride. “We are used to better, of course.”

Eriko, along with her old mother Naomi and her sulky daughter Yumi, sleep on one side of the sacking divide, her only son Haru, head of the household since his father’s death, on the other.

Haru strides about the camp and the girls sneak sideways glances at him, blushing when he looks at them. Satomi is no exception, although she affects disinterest. He has to duck his head when going through doors, which embarrasses him and delights the girls. He is dark-skinned, dark-haired, too serious for his age.

“There’s a bloom about him,” Tamura says. “A pleasing sort of energy.”

At seventeen years and one week old, Haru likes to remind people that he is in his eighteenth year.

“He’s at that halfway stage,” Eriko muses. “More man than boy, and proud, you know?”

It seems to Satomi that when she stands near Haru all she can hear is the sound of her blood rushing to her head, swishing around in her brain like weir water churning. It’s mortifying. The first time he spoke to her it was as if he had stood on her heart, stopped its beating. She loses herself when she’s close to him, finds it impossible to think straight. She can’t stop the heat that rises in her face, the dreadful feeling that she is on the boil. The side effects of being near Haru feel at once horrible and delightful. She admires his reserve, which has nothing of humility in it. If she has a criticism at all, it is that there is little give in him.

She looks for failings in him like those she had seen in Artie but can find none. He is nothing like Artie. He isn’t a show-off, for one thing, and somehow his bossiness is reassuring.

“You should listen to Ralph,” he says to her. “School would do you good.”

She puzzles over the fact that there is something familiar about him, as though in some unexplained way she already knows him. He is interested in her, that’s for sure, but she senses his disapproval too, his irritation with her. He is always quick to criticize.

“You should work on those manners,” he says. “It costs nothing to be polite.”

It feels preachy to her, but it could be his way of flirting. He’s hard to read.

The Okihiros came direct to Manzanar from Los Angeles. In their previous lives they had run a fabric shop in Little Tokyo, and there is something of the city in the way they talk, in their quick step. They seem to shine brighter than those that came from California’s farmlands.

“You would have loved our cottons,” Eriko tells Tamura. “We had striped and gingham—and silk too—well, special orders of silk—so beautiful—so …” Her voice trembles with the memory of it.

After a while she stops speaking of her old life. It is too painful to go on boasting about what you have lost, what you may never get back. And just thinking of the fabrics, their vibrant colors, the clean glazed crispness of them, tops up the hurt in her.

The Okihiros spend a lot of time sitting on the steps of their barrack, beside which they have made a miniature rock garden. Its elegant simplicity has inspired others to do the same, and now in Sewer Alley stone gardens are quite the thing. Such refinements, though, are not for the Sanos, who live on the other side of the Bakers—they think the effort a pointless exercise.

“Might as well put a dress on a monkey,” Mr. Sano says.

Mr. Sano, a wizened little man, is in the habit of touching his wife in public, pulling her caveman-style into their barrack in the
afternoons so that everyone knows what they are up to. Never mind their daughter-in-law, or their grandchildren, who are billeted with them.

Mrs. Sano finds it hard to look people in the eye in case she should meet with a disapproving stare. She feels too old to be the object of her husband’s copious passion; besides, his behavior is not the Japanese way. But then, her husband has always taken his own path, lived in ignorance of others’ sensitivities. There is nothing to be done about it.

“A monkey in a dress could be cute,” Satomi says to Tamura, causing them a fit of the giggles, which turns for Tamura into a bout of coughing.

Despite that Tamura and Satomi are treated by their fellow inmates with a measure of reserve, Eriko is pleased to have them as neighbors. She has befriended them enthusiastically, thinking Tamura delightful, a kind and modest woman in need of a friend.