Southland (6 page)
“Work?” asked Jackie. “On Saturday?”
Laura frowned at the pot, turned down the stove, lifted off the thin membrane that had formed across the surface of the milk. “Get used to the idea, honey. In a few months you’re going to be working a lot more Saturdays than me.”
“Don’t remind me. So what were you doing?”
“Some stuff for Manny. He’s giving a report next month on immigration statistics, and on health and education benefits for legal immigrants. He’s trying to prove that people who were granted amnesty in ’88 are doing better financially since they’ve been eligible for services. Anyway, he’s kind of obsessed with this, which means I have no choice but to be obsessed with him.”
Jackie nodded. Manny was Manny Jimenez, the City Councilman from the 4th District. Although he was a lawyer and wealthy entrepreneur, he still lived in one of the seedier parts of Hollywood, the same neighborhood where he had grown up. He’d been elected by an uneasy coalition of mostly poor Latinos from Hollywood and liberal Jews from the Westside, and now, in his second term, many people considered him a potential candidate for mayor. Jackie was suspicious of the man, as she was of all politicians, but she also respected what he’d done; either way, she was impressed by Laura’s proximity to him.
“What do you have to do?” Jackie asked.
Laura poured the steaming milk into two green mugs and stirred. “Oh, you know. Research, statistics. Some services are going to be cut, too, and I have to figure out what’s practical to fight for.”
They went, mugs in hand, into the living room. There they settled onto the couch, with Laura’s blanket thrown over them and Rodney’s cat, Cedric, curled up somehow on both of their laps. They watched an old movie and then
Saturday Night Live
, getting up between programs to eat leftover pasta, and Laura was asleep by “Weekend Update.” Jackie kept watching, though, glad to have something she could laugh at. The stress of the day was finally receding. Her grandfather was dead and accounted for, and she had one final errand to do, after which she could get on with her life. When the show was over, Jackie extracted Rodney’s cat, who emitted a sleepy mew in protest, and then half-dragged both herself and Laura to bed. She was so tired that, for the first time in several weeks, she wasn’t worried that an aftershock would jolt her out of her sleep; she was unconscious as soon as her head hit the pillow.
At nine a.m., Jackie opened her eyes and listened for the TV music from Rodney’s room that normally ushered them into the morning. She felt Laura stir, and they looked at each other.
“Silence,” Laura said. “Can you believe it?”
Jackie had noticed this too, but her first thought had been, thank God, no wake today, no funeral, no family obligations. “No,” she said. “Maybe we’re still asleep.”
“We can’t be. I have to take my morning pee.”
“You’re right. They’re really gone. For, like, the first time ever.”
“So what should we do?”
“Let’s celebrate.”
They jumped in the shower together, giggling as they soaped each other up, and then made their way back to Laura’s bed, not worrying about the noise they made, the roommates. Afterwards, they lay naked on top of the covers, letting the sun and fresh breeze play over their bodies. They were both spent and relaxed now. No matter how heavily their problems weighed on them, Sunday mornings were still inviolate. In the mornings, they hadn’t argued yet, they began with an empty slate, and if they spent a few satisfying hours together—in bed, over brunch—it could set the tone for the rest of the day.
Like today. They had brunch at the Farmer’s Market and then drove out to Venice Beach, which, on this unusually warm day, was crammed with roller skaters, street performers, barely clad sunbathers, hemp activists, tourists, and dealers. They walked up and down the strip several times, and when the sky began to darken at five, they sat on the beach and watched the sunset. When the last bits of orange and pink cloud had faded back to gray, they headed to Laura’s place, picked up her work clothes, then drove over to Jackie’s apartment. That night, they ate a light dinner and read on opposite ends of the couch. Jackie settled down with her Tax Law reading, crossing her feet on Laura’s lap.
But she couldn’t concentrate. She was thinking about calling Loda Thomas in the morning. And she was thinking about all the days she’d spent with Frank when she was little, how she’d been closer to him, once, than to anyone else. And she was thinking about Lois again, how lost she’d seemed lately; how after the funeral she’d sat on the hood of the car and had not known what to do. Ted had wanted to go out to dinner. Lois wanted to go home. Jackie didn’t care, but thought they should do
something
, something to celebrate the fact that they were still alive and to put a cap on the miserable day. When her grandmother died, what to do had been obvious—after the funeral, they all drove down to Gardena, where Mary’s parents had run a
yakitori
restaurant. The place was under different management then, but most of the employees still remembered the Takayas, their children Mary, Ben, and Grace, and Mary’s husband Frank. That night, Frank consumed more
sake
and beer than Jackie had ever seen him drink, and had fallen asleep, mumbling, on the car ride home. He’d taken such good care of Mary, stopping work altogether the last few months of her illness so he could always be at her side, and that night, after Mary’s funeral, he had been totally overwhelmed; it was the only time Jackie ever saw him cry. And she’d felt guilty with that death, too; she’d gradually grown accustomed to Mary’s withered half-self, so that death, when it came, seemed more like a subtle change than a catastrophe. She’d been young, and her sadness was short-lived and shallow. The night of that funeral, as the rest of her family cried, she’d wondered what was wrong with her.
But this was all too much to contemplate, so she looked across the couch at Laura. And suddenly she found herself distracted by Laura’s hair, the shape of her fingers, the three creases that formed between her eyebrows when she read something that displeased her. Finally, with a sigh, she put her textbook down, then reached over and ran her hand along Laura’s leg. Laura smiled without looking at her, but she put her hand on top of Jackie’s and squeezed. Jackie moved over and touched her face. They kissed, long and slow, and made love again. And afterward, when Jackie drifted off toward sleep, Laura already breathing slowly in her arms, she felt better than she had since her grandfather died; she knew that, at least for this one day, she and Laura had almost been happy.
I
NVISIBLE HANDS. That’s what Mary Takaya felt like; that was her meaning to the family. She cut the chicken and vegetables into pieces small enough to skewer; she cleaned the tables; she made sure there was always fresh rice. Her parents were the ones that everyone saw, her father talkative and loud behind the grill where he cooked the
yakitori
, her mother friendly and solicitous with the customers. Even her little brother Ben was more visible than her—he’d swoop in and out of the tiny restaurant between school and baseball practice, endure their father’s gruff teasing and the questions and affectionate head rubs of the tired clientele. And her older sister Grace was gone now, working as a bookkeeper in Chicago, though both her parents dropped everything for one of her infrequent calls, even shut the restaurant down for a couple of days on her annual trips home to Los Angeles.
But Mary was invisible hands. She did all the back-up work, the thankless work, the someone’s-gotta-take-care-of-it work, and she was only noticed when she
didn’t
do something, or when her hands were too slow, or inexact.
She couldn’t remember if it was better or worse before the war, when Grace still lived at home. In 1940 Mary had been thirteen, shuttling between regular school, Japanese school, and the restaurant where the whole family worked. She was too young to go out with friends the way her older sister did, but old enough to be jealous of her freedom. On Friday and Saturday nights, Mary would sit on the bed in the room they shared and watch her sister get dressed in saddle shoes, a Sloppy Joe sweater, and a short skirt exposing her knees. Then some handsome young Nisei boy would pick her up in his family’s car and they would go dancing in Li’l Tokyo, or sometimes, on International Night, the one night they were allowed, all the way up to the Palladium in Hollywood. Grace’s life seemed exciting and glamorous to her; it was as if she made short but regular trips to a country that Mary had never seen. She envied even the arguments Grace had with their parents, who objected to her clothes and late hours. She suspected that even when her parents waited up by the window, even when their voices rose so loud in anger that she and Ben both plugged their ears, they felt closer to their older child for the trouble she gave; their grudge had sweetened to a kind of delight.
She would have taken screaming fights over silence. She wanted only to be more than invisible hands—to have made-up eyes and sharp mouth and flailing arms like her sister, churning legs and crew-cut hair like her brother. Her parents, happily married although they’d courted through pictures, remained staunchly Japanese in their ways. The Takayas had been shocked by Grace, plunged into the cold and unfamiliar waters of raising a somehow-American child, and with Ben, their bodies had adjusted to the temperature. But Mary, the best-behaved of the children, the most devoted to them, they couldn’t quite manage to see.
And just when she was getting old enough to go to dances herself, just when Troy, from Japanese school, had given her a love letter, the war came and ruined all of her plans. She’d spent the years between fifteen and eighteen at Manzanar, the cramped space and barbed wire a particular kind of torture for a blossoming girl just getting ready to enter her life. It did free her from the restaurant, though, and the mailroom job she took at camp was far better than raw chicken and beef. Her brother didn’t mind the confinement so much—he just went to the camp school, then played outside all afternoon—and her sister worked in the administration office, spending her free time with friends from Little Tokyo.
But Grace, camp, her parents, everything, would have been bearable except for her sixteenth birthday. Her birthday fell in July, on one of the days when the heat was so powerful the whole camp was laid flat, and even the lizards were resting and still. Mary spent the day in the mailroom, cooled somewhat by the government fan, sorting mail for the next day’s delivery. A little after five, when she was getting ready to leave, a shadow fell across the doorway. She thought it was one of the workers, who’d all left for the day, returning for some forgotten item. But when she called out, asking who was there, Vince Tajiri stepped into the room. She gasped a bit, in spite of herself. Vince was the best-looking boy in tenth grade, the class vice president as well as the captain of the camp baseball team. He was taller than her father, light and muscular, with bright black eyes and tiny dimples in each of his cheeks. All the girls, including Mary, grew giggly and tongue-tied in his presence, but to Mary’s surprise, it was he who seemed nervous today.
“Uh, hi,” he said uncertainly.
“Hi,” she replied. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Yeah, you. It’s your birthday, right? I came to say happy birthday.”
She smiled, somewhat puzzled, but pleased. “Thanks.”
He took a few steps over and stopped next to the desk, where she was still seated in the straight-backed chair. He held out a small, already wilting wildflower, which she knew he’d gone all the way out to the edge of camp to pick. Two patches of sweat appeared in the armpits of his navy blue shirt, and while she usually thought of boy-sweat as rank and repulsive, she found it almost charming today. “Thanks,” she said again, taking the flower and setting it down on the desk. She looked up at him and her own nervousness was calmed by the terror she saw in his eyes. She felt the hair on her arms lift toward him, as if growing toward the sun. Then, just as the heat and closeness of his body were becoming unbearable, he leaned over and kissed her, quickly, on the lips. They both jumped away from each other. Then Mary stood up, shakily, and he moved back over. He kissed her again, and this time they stayed. Mary felt a pleasurable tingling sensation arc up and down her spine. She felt his firm, strong hands on her shoulders, on her back. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was—she! Mary Takaya!—and she was so involved in their hands and mouths and just-touching chests that she didn’t hear her sister come in.
There was a sharp, high gasp from the doorway. Mary turned, and Grace was standing just inside the door, hand clamped over her mouth. Mary was so startled she forgot to jump away from Vince. She looked at her sister (who’d come to take her back to the barracks, where their mother was going to surprise her with a cake), expecting her to say, I won’t tell Mom and Dad, or maybe, I
will
tell Mom and Dad. Anything but what she did do, which was laugh, at first softly, but then the sound broke the surface of her mouth and turned into a full, delighted whoop. “
You?
” Grace managed, between hysterical bursts. “Oh my God, oh my God, it’s so funny.”
Vince pulled away from Mary, not meeting her eyes. Finally, without saying a word, he squeezed out the door past Grace. Mary wanted to call out to him, but couldn’t risk more laughter. She hated her sister then. She hated her so much that she couldn’t look at her through the surprise of receiving the lemon cake, which her mother had made from carefully stocked provisions, hidden until her daughter’s birthday arrived. She hated her so much that when Grace left the camp to work as an assistant bookkeeper for a church in Chicago, Mary barely opened her mouth to say goodbye.
After the war, the Takayas reopened their restaurant, which they’d been lucky enough not to sell. Mary’s father had bought it from money pooled by their
kenjinkai
, and when most other Issei were selling their houses and businesses in the panicked spring of ’42, Takaya had flatly refused. Now, in 1947, he had as many black customers as Japanese, but he didn’t mind the shift in clientele; money was green no matter what the color of the hand it came out of. Mary worked at the restaurant every day. Her parents promised they’d let her go to college soon, as Grace had done; they just needed to get ahead in terms of money. But as a year passed, then two, then three, college was starting to seem as remote to her as the country her parents had come from.
Then one afternoon Frank Sakai came in and suddenly made her visible. He’d brought his mother, who he accompanied to Li’l Tokyo every week. He sat down and watched Mary, lifting his eyebrows, once, when she looked at him. When she came over to their table, turned his cup over and poured him some tea, he caught her eye and asked softly what was wrong. This boldness was so unusual for a Nisei man that she jerked back and spilled the hot liquid on his arm—a move that would have brought on a scolding from her father if he hadn’t known it was caused by love. No harm was done other than a red streak on Frank’s nicely muscled forearm, just where the boiling tea had hit, and after many embarrassed apologies and bows by both Mary and her parents, the whole incident seemed to be forgotten. Except that Frank Sakai’s steady gaze followed her around the restaurant, and she wondered how he’d known she was depressed. A few days later, her father and one of the customers had a conversation that Mary knew she was meant to overhear. Frank Sakai was a store manager, they made it known, well on his way to establishing himself enough to break away from the man he worked for and start his own business. At twenty-three he was still unmarried, and while his mother had tried to match him up with two beautiful and promising young Nisei girls, he had stubbornly insisted upon choosing his own bride. Mary appreciated her father’s efforts, but they really weren’t necessary—she had already noticed the young veteran with the slight hitch in his step. Her parents started letting her take breaks when the Sakais were there, nevermind that her mother had to pick up the slack of things left undone by the invisible hands. She and Frank spoke of their families, their hopes and aspirations. She wanted to be a teacher, and when she told him this, his eyes darkened with a sadness that she didn’t understand. It didn’t matter, though. She was in love. When Frank came in with his mother, he always watched after her, getting her another napkin when her first one was dirty, refilling her cup of green tea. His mother and Mary’s parents would bow to each other, smile, and then complain good-heartedly about their American children. In this way, they skipped the go-betweens, the meetings, the formal introductions. All the parents were there when Frank asked Mr. Takaya for his daughter’s hand. And as the three parents drank
sake
in celebration, he and Mary sat quietly, just smiling at each other, fingers intertwined beneath the table.
She moved to Angeles Mesa, into the house on Edgehill where Frank lived with his mother. Frank’s mother cleaned houses now, and Frank worked every day at the store. Mrs. Sakai, after years of propositions, suggestions, pleading, and hints, was not joyous so much as relieved that her only son had finally married. She kept her dead husband appraised of the events, filling him in every evening as she paid her respects in front of the
butsudan
, and he seemed pleased with the match as well. The children came quickly—Rose about a year after the marriage, in 1948; Lois just a year and a half later. There was a brother too, three years younger than Lois, but he’d been stillborn, expelled from the womb with the umbilical cord twisted around his neck. For the first few years, Mary Sakai had stayed home with her children; when Lois was five, she went back to school and finally became a teacher. And there on Edgehill Street they had stayed, for seventeen years, until that other conflagration, the war turned inward, of 1965.