A Girl Like You (3 page)

But equal as it seemed, it was not the same sacrifice. For Tamura it fought against her obedient nature and was all pain. The letting go of her family inflicted a wound that would never heal. Yet without knowing why, Aaron was pleased to do it. He walked away as though he had from the first been a cuckoo in the alien nest of his parents’ home. He walked away a free man.

They had married in a civil ceremony, with strangers for witnesses, and had instantly left Hawaii for California, where Aaron used his savings to buy ten acres of Depression-cheap land on the outskirts of the small town of Angelina.

“Your father never looked back, but sometimes I still cry for my mother,” Tamura told Satomi. “Love makes you do things that you never thought you were capable of.”

But Satomi thought their desertion of their families heartless. If they needed only each other, where did that leave her?

The eggs are cooked just as she likes them, but as usual Tamura has made too many and she can’t finish them. In any case it is too hot to eat, too hot to think, even.

“Don’t bring Lily home,” Tamura pleads. “No point in stirring up trouble.”

Aaron thinks Lily sly, says that he doesn’t like the way she looks down her nose at people.

“Don’t know what she thinks she’s got that makes her better than us. A scrawny scrap of a thing like her.”

Satomi had rushed to the protection of her friendship with Lily.

“She’s my best friend, Father. She’s the only one who doesn’t mind being friends with a Jap.”

“I’ve warned you about that word before. I don’t want to hear it from you ever again.”

Jap, Jap, Jap
, she had repeated in her mind, feeling heartsick.

Neither the eggs nor Tamura’s pandering satisfy. She can’t shake the feeling that her mother has betrayed her in some way, that she has shown herself to be an unreliable ally. Yet once out of the house, try as she might to hold on to it, her bad mood drifts away on the little breeze that fetches up a half a mile or so from the school house.

She senses it first on the nape of her neck, a delicious lick on the run of red where the sun has found her out. Walking backward, so that it’s fresh on her face, she doesn’t hear the distant thunder, but the faint smell of metal in the air tells her that at last the storm is coming. Aaron as usual has gotten it right.

She lingers at the roadside waiting for it, not caring that it will make her late. The light is eerie now, a hoary gray, the sun hunkered behind the clouds. And then the first drops fall big as pebbles,
soaking her through so that her nipples and the line of her panties can be seen through the thin cotton of her dress.

In the cool air that follows the downpour her body seems to reconnect with her mind, and, being her father’s daughter, her own immediate concerns take over. She tells herself that she doesn’t care about anything, doesn’t care about being on the outside, about being a Jap, about not being blond. But suddenly she is restless, can’t wait to grow up, to pursue whatever that intimate thing is that is between her parents. She wants a magical room of her own, territory to feel included in.

School is out of the question. She can’t be bothered to spar with kids who are little more than babies compared to her. Her teacher, Mr. Beck will raise his eyes at yet another absence. He won’t mark it in the truant book, though, she knows that; knows it like she pretends not to know that he stares at her in lessons, lolling back in his chair, wetting his lips with his long pale tongue.

She’ll go skinny-dipping in the river, feel the weeds between her toes. There will be nobody to spy on her at this time of day. She’ll wade out to where there’s still a bit of deep and submerge herself. After, she will lie on the sandy bank, light up, and practice blowing smoke rings.

In the years that followed the burning summer, Satomi glimpsed no other life on the horizon for herself.

“It’s the same boring old road,” she complained to Lily. “No bends or corners to turn, no surprises ahead, just straight on.”

“Same old, same old,” Lily agreed.

Satomi read and read, and laughed and argued with Lily, and fought her enemies, and attempted through her behavior not to be Mr. Beck’s favorite. She swam alone in the river, slipping under the deep water, holding her breath until she felt like bursting. She hid
from her father’s demands in the pine woods with her book and her roll-up cigarettes.

Life was marked only by the smallest of things. A surprising flurry of snow one January, followed by a summer of glut that didn’t please Aaron; too many tomatoes on the market meant the price went low and set his mood to match. And once, as she slept, an earth tremor came in the night and cracked their windows, putting Tamura’s hens in a panic. But small concerns aside, the road went on, straight for as far as the eye could see.

Toward her fourteenth birthday she started her monthly bleeds and was told by Tamura that she was a woman now. It didn’t feel like it to her. She still had to go to school, still had to dance to Aaron’s tune.

Her first bra came around the same time as the bleeding and, seeing it hanging on the line, Aaron teased that it looked like a catapult for peanuts. She never hung it where he could see it again.

Her first kiss came too. Tom Broadbent, a boy with lizard eyes and an uninhibited nature, pushed her up against the school wall and pressed his dry lips to hers for a second or two. She had thought kissing would be better than that, something soft and tingly, something delicious, something like nothing else.

“He kisses everyone,” Lily said contemptuously, jealous that on both counts, bra and kiss, Satomi had gotten there first.

Among Angelina’s large white community, its small Japanese one, there is no one like her, no other half-and-half in the area. She’d ditch the Japanese half if she could. It takes the shine off how great it is to be an American somehow. The thought that she might be the only one in the world is too scary to think about. Lily says that there must be others the same, though.

“Don’t get to thinking you’re an original, Sati. Sure to be some like you in the city.”

“Guess you’re right, Lily. Guess nobody’s a one-off.”

What would she do without Lily telling it as it is? Lily’s the reason she doesn’t play truant more often, Lily and the fact that school’s not so bad. At least it’s an escape from her rule-bound home, a place to be disobedient in without feeling she’s hurting her mother.

While slavishly following Satomi’s bad habits, Lily thinks herself an original, a cut above the rest. Satomi thinks her fine too, and together they revel in being the risky girls, the ones who took up smoking first—took to cursing like the boys. The schoolyard rings with cursing. “Fuck” is the boys’ favorite; “damn,” the girls’.

If Mr. Beck catches them at it, the punishment is ten strokes with a brass-edged ruler on the palm of the hand. The devilish thing inflicts sooty blood blisters where the corner of it whips at the skin. Satomi wears hers like a badge of honor.

“Hey, Satomi, who gave you those love bites?” the boys taunt her.

“Come over here and get some more, I’ve never tasted a Jap.”

“With a face like yours you never will.” She’s sewn up tight against their calls, too tight to let a bunch of no-hopers unstitch her.

There’s one, though, whom she isn’t immune to, so that on a truant afternoon lazing by the river, when the heat had seeped into her brain, turning her thoughts to mush, when even the birds seemed to be sleeping, she let Artie Goodwin, the best-looking boy in the school, get to second base with her.

In a torment of jealousy over Artie and not knowing her advice was already too late, Lily set down the rules for Satomi in a voice of doom.

“Don’t let him get past first base,” she ordered, staring Satomi feverishly in the eye. “That’s just kissing. I guess that can’t do
much harm. Second base is kissing and touching over clothes, that’s okay if you are going steady, which you aren’t, are you?”

“Could if I wanted, Lily.”

“Well, whatever, third base is out of bounds. They want to kiss and touch you under your clothes, ugh! Anyway, if you let them do it, it means you’re a tramp.”

“I can guess what a home run is.”

“Home run is sex. Never allow a boy a home run, it could ruin you for life.”

Lily’s cousin Dorothy had allowed Davey Cromer a home run, and he had bolted when she got pregnant.

“Everyone knew that Dorothy wasn’t good enough for him,” Lily said. “His family being the biggest pea growers in the area an all. And that’s no more than the truth.”

Dorothy is the bogeyman in Lily’s family, held up to the girls to show them what will happen if they let their morals lapse.

“Anyway, Sati, I don’t know what you see in Artie, he’s always strutting around like the ‘big I am,’ and you’re not the only one he flirts with.”

“Yeah, maybe so, but he sure is good-looking, you have to agree.”

“I guess. If you like the pretty-boy type.”

Lily tries not to let her jealousy show on her face. Satomi Baker is supposed to be her best friend, after all. She doesn’t want people thinking that Sati has won the prize that she’s desperate for herself.

“Guess you two ain’t such good friends as you thought, eh, Lily?” smirk the girls whose friendship she has shunned. She hates that they know, in that way that girls know, that she’s keen on Artie herself.

It’s her own fault, she guesses. She chose Satomi as her best friend with the idea of showing everyone that she was something pretty special herself. Lily Morton isn’t one to follow the herd.
You can’t tell her what to do. Truth is, though, she wishes she had never set eyes on Satomi. Satomi is hard work, and now the worst has happened and Satomi has Artie. If only Artie hadn’t been so cute, so curly-haired and fondant-lipped, she wouldn’t ache so.

“Guess he likes Japs,” the girls jeer. “Why else would he favor her over you, Lily?”

“Sex, for sure.” She hadn’t been able to stop herself from saying it. Well, it was no more than the truth, boys were always out for sex, and Artie knew he wouldn’t get a sniff at it with a respectable girl like her. Never mind that she pouts her lips and crosses her legs in that come-and-get-it way whenever he glances at her.

In her daydreams Lily has Satomi running away from home, or dying quickly from some rare disease. She pictures disfiguring scabs, bad breath, sees herself comforting Artie, him falling for her.

In those daydreams Lily stars as the beauty; in reality she worries that her lips might be a bit too thin, her legs too up-and-down. She likes the dainty little maps of freckles across her cheeks, though, comforts herself that, better late than never, her breasts have started to grow. And one day she swears to God she is going to dye her mousy hair bright blond; then let Satomi watch out.

And I am white, after all, just like Artie,
she reminds God in her prayers.
It would be better all around.

Jealous she may be, but Lily knows that however much the boys might puppydog after Satomi, she will never be the one for keeps. You can’t take a half-caste home to your mother and say this is the one. All she has to do is play the waiting game. Artie’s bound to come to his senses.

“I don’t think we can be friends if you go to third base with Artie,” Lily threatens. “They’ll tar me with the same brush as you, and I don’t want people thinking I’m like my cousin. They’ll say it runs in the family.”

“Fine, Lily, I’ll let you know when the time comes. You can drop me then.”

But Lily will never drop her. They’ll be best friends forever, she’s sure of it. And Lily’s advice is meant well, she’s only trying to help, to save her from herself. It seems to Satomi that Lily knows the rules for everything. She marvels at how she lists them with such confidence:

“Red shoes are common.”

“Eating in the street is cheap.”

“Never, ever wear white after Labor Day.”

Lily likes to think that one day she will have the kind of life where the rules matter. She gathers in the little nuggets of what she thinks of as wisdom, from advertisements, and the radio, and from the hand-me-down magazines her mother is given by the undertaker’s wife she cleans for. She plans never to break the rules herself, they are as true for her as though she has read them in the Bible. She holds dear to the belief of the inexperienced, that there is such a thing as natural justice. Follow the rules and reap the rewards, is her motto.

Despite Lily’s misgivings, Satomi longs for red shoes, finds seductive the idea that a home run might change things forever. Change is good, isn’t it? Why wait for things to happen? Left to their own devices, they might never.

Those thrilling embraces, the weight of Artie as they lay together in the woods, the smell of leaf mold and fern in the air, keep from her mind Lily’s warnings and the tale of Dorothy’s downfall. She may not be ready to allow a home run, but everything else is up for grabs.

“Oh, God, you smell so good,” Artie croons as he lights two cigarettes with one match shielded in his hand against the breeze.

“You’ve got to give me some sugar.”

“Oh, you get plenty of sugar, Artie.”

“You know what I mean, Sati. Sure you do.”

He takes a long drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke escape through his nose, and hands hers to her in the way he has seen it done in the movies.

“I want us to go all the way. You know I’m going to marry you, no matter what anyone says.”

“Oh, that’s big of you, Artie. But don’t count on me saying yes.”

“Come on, course you will. Guys like me don’t come by the dozen.”

“Hmm.”

She isn’t even sure that she likes Artie that much, but his embraces excite her, they induce the sweetest tingling of her skin, and strange little leaps of longing that keep her blood singing. Lured by the meaty bulk of his body, the urgency in him, it’s hard sometimes not to go all the way. But it’s her own fears, not Lily’s, that stop her. She may not like it, but there’s something of her father in her that won’t bend. Artie can go his own sweet way if he wants. It’s her rules or no game.

“What’s so great about Artie Goodwin?” one boy after another asks. “He’s soft as shit. You want more than that, don’t you?”