Garden of Stones (11 page)

Lucy blushed, embarrassed by the ludicrousness of the question. It was like asking if the sun was bright enough or if the distant mountains were tall, and she hoped Jessie didn’t mistake the question for false modesty.

“You look very nice,” she said softly. Miyako didn’t need makeup, with her flawless, pale skin and perfectly arched brows, her glossy upswept hair. The deep shade of her suit complemented her coloring perfectly, and a stranger would miss the subtle evidence of her apprehension. In fact, the flush of excitement and nervousness hinted at something else entirely, something sensual and sly, her beauty provocative, her eyes brimming with intimations.

“Thank you, dear. I am hoping to get a position making patterns, what do you think of that? Skilled work, nineteen dollars a month.”

“Wow,” Lucy said. That was almost the highest pay grade. Auntie Aiko must have pulled some strings. Recently, Aiko had begun spending time with a man who was a member of the community council, a widower in his sixties named Roy Hamaguchi who had owned a grocery store in Victorville before the war—perhaps he had used his influence. “When can you start?”

Miyako laughed, a feathery sound that Lucy had not heard in a long time. “Let me get the job first! But I know they need to hire people fast. Aiko says they have received thirty-eight industrial sewing machines.”

Lucy felt a stirring of hope. Her mother’s sewing skills were legendary. Though Lucy’s father was happy to buy Miyako all the clothes she wanted from the best stores, she loved to sew her own, combining bits from different patterns to make something wholly original. She favored Vogue patterns, especially the Schiaparelli and Lanvin designs suitable only for experts, and modified them to suit herself. A fitted jacket might be composed of six separate pieces in the front and back alone, not even counting the sleeves or placket or collar.

“Where will the job be?” Jessie asked.

“They’re setting up a building in Block Four, near the warehouses. They’re bringing in a man from the garment industry. From New York.”

“Why does he want to come all the way from New York?”

“They don’t have enough workers, because of the war.” She gave them a final smile and turned to go inside. “Well, I had better go finish getting ready. If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late.”

“It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Takeda,” Jessie said formally.

Lucy watched her disappear into the building, trying to quell her nerves. It was the first time her mother had surfaced from her isolation since they had arrived in Manzanar, the first time she’d breached the still surface of her ennui. But Lucy had learned long ago not to trust these bright moods. They never lasted. The glorious hope would shrivel and crack, and Miyako, as stunned as anyone to discover that she was still the victim of her own mind, would slip back into despair, into the darkened bedroom, into the cell of their room in Block Fourteen.

Much later Lucy would learn the official terms, diagnoses that sought to explain these ripe, dangerous, easily shattered moods. Depression was Miyako’s known world; mania her occasional frenzied escape. But for now Lucy just saw that Miyako had swung, like the heavy pendulum at the Griffith Observatory high above the Hollywood Hills, to the edge of the orbit of her life, where it felt as though she might break away and go hurtling through space.

“Gosh, your mother’s pretty,” Jessie said.

“I know. I mean, thanks.”

“You look exactly like her,” he added, and Lucy felt the warmth creeping along her skin, evaporating her worries. “Come on. I’m starving.”

* * *

After lunch, a chaotic, noisy affair punctuated by the shrill shrieks of the little boys Lucy sometimes babysat, Jessie suggested walking over to the ball fields. “We can check out the competition.”

When they arrived at the stands, however, a little group had already taken the best seats: Irene Purcell, along with half a dozen other Caucasian teenage girls. Lucy recognized some of them from her delivery route, though she’d never exchanged more than a word or two with any of them. When they saw Jessie, a couple of them waved.

“Do you know them?” Lucy asked.

“A little.”

“Hey, Jessie,” a pudgy redhead called. “Want to sit with us?”

“Nah, it’s okay. We’re not staying. Got to be somewhere else.”

Lucy smiled to herself, her annoyance at the girl’s flirting overshadowed by the way Jessie had said
we,
the ease with which he included her in his fibbing.

“Oh, are you working?” another girl said. “I can’t believe you guys work for them anyway when they don’t pay you. It’s like you’re their slave.”

Lucy didn’t respond, even when she noticed Irene smirking at her. She wondered what the girls would say if they knew that her father had had his own factory, that once, on her birthday, he’d arranged for the toy department at Bullock’s to devote a clerk and the doll counter to her while she picked out a dozen outfits for her birthday doll and a wardrobe lined with genuine China silk to store them in. That her father had driven a gleaming Mercury, which, after his death, was stored in the garage and then sold for a fraction of its worth to the men who came to the neighborhood in the final desperate days before evacuation.

She wanted to let it go, wanted to believe she was unaffected by their casual cruelty. Tried to remember that she was the daughter of Miyako Takeda, famous in her neighborhood for her perfect complexion and tiny waist and mysterious smile. And that Jessie had chosen
her,
not any of them. But still, their condescension cut deep.

“You have a thing,” she said to the redhead, tapping the corner of her upper lip.

The girl blinked. “What?”

“A...smudge or something. What did you have for lunch? It looks like gravy.”

The girl blushed furiously and rubbed at her mouth. Lucy stared directly at Irene and smiled, deciding that even if she couldn’t always keep them from getting under her skin, she would never let it show.

* * *

On the other side of the ball field, there was an equipment shed built from wood salvaged from barracks construction, and behind it someone had built a pair of long benches with rough notched legs. Here Jessie and Lucy sat, out of sight of the players and the observers in the stands, and Lucy lit her first cigarette using the book of matches Jessie offered her.

Jessie watched her. “Have you smoked before?”

Lucy considered trying to pretend she had, but she knew there was more to smoking than met the eye. Instead she shrugged and puffed as she lit the cigarette, holding it between her index and middle fingers, as she’d seen the older girls do.

The smoke was intriguing and shocking at once. She felt it travel down her throat and willed herself not to react. She held Jessie’s gaze and closed her mouth on the smoke and tensed all her muscles, curling her toes and stiffening her shoulders against the cough. Her eyes watered and she held her breath and in a moment the urge passed.

Jessie smiled.

After a while, they ground the cigarette butts into the dirt. Lucy liked the way the toe of her shoe felt twisting into the fine soil, crushing the filter.

“Have you had a boyfriend before?” Jessie asked. “Back in Los Angeles?”

Lucy knew she was supposed to be coy, to play it cool.
Who wants to know?
she could imagine the high school girls saying, or
What’s it to you?

But it wasn’t like that with Jessie. When he kissed her, it had felt...important.

“No,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “You’re my first.”

This time when they kissed, Lucy forgot about everything that was wrong. When Jessie’s arms were around her, he was all there was in the world.

* * *

Lucy stood on a chair to drape her blouse over the partition and air out the smoke. She meant to take down the blouse before her mother got home, but when Miyako returned a little after six o’clock, Lucy was dozing, her finger marking her place in a book she’d borrowed from the lending library.

“I got the job,” Miyako said. “I already started working, they asked me to begin right then and there. You should see the sewing machines, Lucy—they’re brand-new. They can hold a thread cone this big.”

She held her fingers six inches apart, her voice filled with wonder as she talked about the machines, the converted barrack, the bolts of yard goods wrapped in paper and stacked along the wall, the cutting tables with the heavy scissors, and the bins on the floor for collecting scraps. “Nothing is to be wasted,” she said. “Some of the others are piecing the scraps into a quilt. They’re going to use surplus wool as batting.”

“Do you like the other ladies?”

“They’re fine. I have more experience than all of them except a lady from Bakersfield. Miu something. She worked in a children’s garment factory.” Miyako sniffed, dismissive of the others’ skills or irritated at being bested, or both.

“And your boss?”

Her mother’s mouth pulled down faintly. “My
supervisor
. Mrs. Driscoll bites her nails. We will see what she knows of sewing.”

Lucy turned away, heeding her mother’s imperious tone.

“And Mr. George Rickenbocker. The businessman from New York,” Miyako went on. “He was there. He walks among the tables, watching us work, like this.” She clasped her hands behind her back, and did a pantomime, walking the length of their tiny room between their beds. “He is an important man,
suzume
. A big boss.”

“Won’t he be going back to New York soon? To run his company?”

Miyako wrinkled her nose. “He will be staying here for several months to establish the business. He has taken an apartment in the staff quarters. We’ll see how he likes the desert, after his fancy New York City life.”

Lucy watched her mother talk and gesture. Miyako could be witty, even saucy, when she was in her best moods. Maybe this job would be good for her; maybe she would make friends. She still had a chance to be normal, to shrug off the cloak of isolation she’d pulled around herself since they’d arrived in camp. Lucy thought of the clusters of women in the ironing house, gossiping and laughing over their work, or even fussing over sick children together. Sharing moments of levity and of grief. Wasn’t that the way a woman’s life was supposed to be?

As if sensing her thoughts, Miyako placed her hand on Lucy’s cheek. Lucy was startled to realize that she had grown in recent months; she was almost at eye level with her mother.

“You must be careful during the day, when I am working,” her mother said, the levity suddenly gone from her voice, the familiar unease tightening her features. She cupped Lucy’s face and stared intently into her eyes. Lucy wanted to grasp her mother’s good mood and cling to it, but Miyako’s mind followed its own ever-changing rhythms.

Still, her mother’s request came from nowhere. Since their arrival in the camp, it was Lucy who had ventured out each day: enduring the freezing cold, the stinging dust storms; waiting in line at the mess hall to get food for both of them; buying her mother licorice or packets of hairpins at the general store when Deputy Chief Griswold occasionally gave her a dime. Lucy was careful in the way of someone who knew that she could not leave the square mile, surrounded by razor-wire fencing, in which she lived; who never forgot that in the towers above them, armed soldiers stared down and watched her movements.

Staring into her mother’s eyes, with their long, thick lashes and perfect swipes of eyeliner, Lucy understood that even on her worst days, her mother loved her deeply and would stop at nothing to protect her.

“Yes,” Lucy whispered. “I will be careful.”

Her mother tightened her grip, her fingernails digging into the soft skin beneath Lucy’s chin. “You must,” she said. “You
must
.”

12

San Francisco
Wednesday, June 7, 1978

Patty sipped at her glass of chenin blanc, her third. She hadn’t been much of a drinker before Jay. She hadn’t been much of
anything
before Jay, just another single girl in the city, waiting for a man to come along before making any real life decisions.

When Patty was younger, she had allowed herself to imagine what it would be like when she met that perfect man, the one who would see in her what everyone else was missing. As the years of awkward dates passed and boyfriends came and went, she began to wonder if the right man for her even existed. Jay—thank God for him—had come just as she was beginning to give up.

It had taken until she was nearly thirty-two, but she had found him, introduced by friends at a raucous house party that she had been on the verge of escaping. Jay got her a beer and led her out on the rickety wooden deck and pointed out the houses of famous people far off in Pacific Heights, then admitted he’d made the whole thing up to impress her.

Jay was only thirty-nine and already an associate partner, and he reveled in his family’s pride in him. Jay wanted children—two, three,
four
of them!—and he called her mother Mrs. T. and brought her flowers from the BART station whenever he came over. Jay fixed whatever broke at her mother’s place, and he was the best thing that had ever happened to Patty, by far.

And yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she’d found in the album. It was too big, too confusing, too frightening, and she was hardly ready to face the implications herself.

Instead, she kept drinking. She was buzzed and she knew it. Her mother had gone to bed early, claiming not to have slept well the night before. So much for her mother’s day off, their planned mother-daughter day. By the time Patty returned from her trip to Forrest’s house, her mother was in the backyard in her big straw sun hat, weeding. Patty poured her a tumbler of iced tea and went outside to chat, but Lucy was focused on getting the small rock garden cleared of the matted chaff that accumulated during the spring rains. After a few failed attempts at conversation, Patty gave up and went back inside.

She’d opened the bottle of wine to go with the Chinese takeout she had ordered, but Lucy had declined. Now, the dishes done and her glass topped off, her mother’s bedroom door closed and the house silent except for the hum of the dishwasher, Patty retrieved the album labeled MANZANAR from her room and brought it to the kitchen table.