Weedflower (2 page)

“Sumiko-chan!” her grandfather called from the outhouse. There was a crack in the wood that he always peered out of. Sometimes he liked to talk to the family right through the outhouse wall! He had no dignity because he was so old. Still, he made Sumiko smile a lot. She ran to the outhouse.

“Yes, Jiichan.”

“When is party?” he said.

“I thought you didn’t hear me.”

“Whole neighborhood hear you,” he said.

“It’s Saturday.”

He didn’t speak. Sometimes he just stopped talking, and you didn’t know whether you were supposed to wait at the outhouse or not. If you asked him if he wanted you to wait outside, he would snap that you had interrupted his train of thought. If you waited without asking, he would look surprised when he came out.

“I thinking, maybe it better I drive you to party instead of your uncle,” he suddenly said. “I wait in car nearby in case you get hurt.” Though Jiichan had lived in the United States for several decades, he didn’t sound like it. Sometimes he spoke
chanpon,
which was a mix of Japanese and English; sometimes he spoke Japanese; and when he talked to Sumiko and Tak-Tak, he spoke mangled English.

Jiichan already seemed as obsessed with this party as Sumiko was.

“Jiichan! I’m not going to get hurt at a birthday party!” she said to the outhouse.

“I just thinking. But if you got no respect for old man opinion, never mind, never mind.”

Sumiko laughed. “I’m going to be fine. Maybe they’ll ask me to sing a song!” Was that what they did at birthday parties? She liked to sing. Once she’d even been chosen to sing a song alone during a school assembly. She’d gotten a little flustered and sung the same verse twice, but otherwise, she’d done great. She imagined a crowd of classmates surrounding her at the party.

“Sumiko!” Jiichan said. “Are you listening?”

“Sorry, Jiichan. What did you say?”

“I say go get your uncle!”

She shouted out, “Uncle! Jiichan wants you!” Uncle looked up from the fields and headed in.

“You break my eardrum,” Jiichan said.

Sumiko returned to the bathhouse to check the water (not hot enough yet], went into the stable to check Tak-Tak (still brushing Baba), and hurried to the shed to grade the cut carnations Ichiro had just brought in from the field. He smiled as she passed.

The shed was yet another drafty building on the farm. Empty
taru
—barrels—that soy sauce came in were piled on top of one another along the walls, waiting to be filled with carnations for tomorrow morning’s market. Sumiko was supposed to grade the
flowers and put them into the
taru
. That was one of her main jobs.

Flower farmers charged more for their most beautiful, biggest, nearly flawless flowers. Sumiko graded the best carnations #1 and the next best #2. Only carnations were graded inside the shed. The stock were graded right out in the field.

The worst carnations that farmers sold were splits—flowers where the calyx didn’t hold the petals together right. They were still pretty, but they were bought by funeral parlors or else cheap markets like street-corner flower vendors. Jiichan said men bought street-corner flowers on the way home from work on days when their wives were mad at them. He said someday he was going to write a book of all his theories.

Sometimes Sumiko slipped a #1 flower into the splits because she felt sorry for the poor dead people who were getting defective flowers. But she also felt guilty that a good flower might be wasted on dead people who wouldn’t even notice. So either way she felt a little bad.

As she picked up the first stem from the pile, Sumiko remembered proudly how Uncle had said she was the only one in the family whose hands were both quick and gentle—perfect hands for grading. In fact, she was the only one in the family allowed to grade the carnations. That was one reason she knew
how important she was to the farm. From the beginning, Uncle and Auntie had never asked her to work, but she still remembered lying in her new bedroom after her parents died, worrying that she and her brother would get sent to an orphanage. So the next day she’d gotten up and scrubbed all the floors. Jiichan still brought it up sometimes. “I remember when your parents die, all you do is scrub floor for week. We thought you crazy.” And she had not stopped working since then.

She placed a batch of #1s into the
taru
. Tak-Tak came in and watched her for a moment. “Do you think Baba loves me or Bull or you more?” he asked.

“Maybe she loves all of us for different reasons.”

“Why does she love me?”

“Because you brush her.” He was silent, and she glanced at him. He was smiling to himself. Then his eyes grew curious. “Why does she love Bull?” he said.

“Because he was her first friend.”

“Does she love you?”

“Yes, because I’m her friend too.”

He followed her to the bathhouse to put the platform in the bottom of the tub, and then he followed her back to the shed.

Sumiko separated some of the bunches by color but mixed the colors in other bunches. Sometimes she took too long to bunch flowers because she liked them to look just so. Personally, she didn’t favor the
reds, pinks, and whites of carnations. She liked the stock better—they came in just about every color. Lately, peach was her favorite stock color. In fact, she’d made Uncle plant a little section of just peach so that she could use the flowers for the dinner table.

She kept the shed door open so she could keep track of who was walking in and out of the bathhouse. The men bathed in order of age—Jiichan first, then Uncle, then Ichiro, then Bull, and then Tak-Tak. After that came Auntie and, finally, Sumiko. Every night while Tak-Tak took his bath, Sumiko went inside the house to start the rice. She always divided daytime and nighttime by when Tak-Tak finished his bath. After he finished bathing, it was considered nighttime, and just a few mealtime chores remained before Sumiko allowed herself to stop working.

Tonight she couldn’t wait until dinner was over so she could take the time to study her two best dresses and decide what to wear to the party. Auntie had made her a new dress a few months ago for a wedding. The dress actually rustled when she walked! She also owned a mint green school dress that she liked. It was a hard decision.

2

W
HEN
A
UNTIE FINISHED BATHING
, S
UMIKO WENT OUT
for her turn. To keep the water clean for as many days as possible, they all washed themselves off with sponges, soap, and a bucket of water before they got into the tub. By the time Sumiko bathed, both the water and the air had cooled off. Sumiko could not remember ever taking a hot bath in a nice steamy room.

She got undressed and sponged off. She always checked the scars on her tummy, from the car accident her parents had been killed in so many years earlier. She didn’t remember much about it except spinning around.

She climbed into the tub and swooshed her whole head and body under the water. The water pressed softly against her face. She had a thought and sat up quickly. Should she bring some flowers to the party? Someday when she achieved her goal of owning a flower shop, she would be an expert in arranging flowers. She loved to create arrangements for the dining-room table. Sometimes she liked an orderly arrangement, and sometimes she liked something wilder. Now she decided to bring a bunch of peach stock to the party. Everyone would love the scent and the wildness of the flowers.

She held her breath and dunked underneath the water again. When she lifted her head, she could feel a breeze from a crack in the wall. She stepped into the chilly air, dried off quickly, and went inside without draining the tub. It was her job to decide when to empty the tub and put in fresh water. Auntie didn’t like to waste water, so sometimes Sumiko kept the same water all week. On the farm they all had their farm duties, and in general they didn’t like to tell one another how to do their jobs. Once in a while someone would say casually within her hearing, “The bathwater is getting a little stale.” Or, “I wonder when Sumiko will change the bathwater.” Today the water was definitely getting a little musty, but not quite musty enough to change.

That night Sumiko couldn’t focus on any of
the chatter during dinner. The grown-ups seemed obsessed with someone named Mrs. Sumiko Hata, whose brother and husband had suffered heart attacks within days of each other, which resulted in Mrs. Hata’s son taking over their Oregon potato farm, which started a chain reaction that ended in the previously wealthy Hata family nearly going broke and thereby providing gossip for
Nikkei
all up and down the coast.
Nikkei
were anyone in America of Japanese descent, whether they were born in the United States or Japan. Sumiko had never met Mrs. Hata, and neither had her family.

Jiichan liked to say that Sumiko’s head was divided in half: the half that liked to work and the half that liked to daydream. As everyone ate and chatted she started daydreaming about what kind of cake Marsha Melrose would serve at her party. Sumiko’s most favorite cake ever was the strawberry cake that Mrs. Muramoto had served one year at the Muramotos’ annual New Year’s Day party. If Marsha’s mother served strawberry cake, she wasn’t sure whether it would be considered rude to ask for a second slice. Her mind snapped back to the table when she heard Ichiro say, “A friend of mine thinks that the U.S. government may execute all the
Nikkei
if war with Japan breaks out.”

Sumiko had heard that rumor before, but Uncle had admonished her not to believe it. He said “only
crazy people” believed that. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Which friend?” Some of Ichiro’s friends had been to college, so they were really smart.

Ichiro started to answer, but Auntie cut him off. “No war talk at the dinner table.”

It was all really complicated, and things changed constantly. But as far as Sumiko understood, Nazi Germany had taken over France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Austria, and some other countries, and Germany had bombed England and then attacked the Soviet Union, or else attacked the Soviet Union and
then
bombed England … or maybe did them both at once. And Ichiro said the United States had imposed an oil embargo on Japan, who had signed a pact with Germany and Italy. And this was all just off the top of Sumiko’s head—there was a lot more going on. The world was a huge mess. But the United States was officially neutral, and Ichiro had read somewhere that more than 90 percent of Americans opposed getting involved in the war. So Sumiko assumed there would be no war and she could continue to work on her flowers until things settled down.

Every day she looked at the peaceful flower fields, and sat in school learning social studies and math and music, and slept in her warm bed, and she just couldn’t believe that the United States would ever get involved in a war.

Ichiro looked at his watch. He went out a lot, but Auntie always insisted he stay until dinner was finished.

Ichiro was a dandy. He’d already gotten ready to go out, which meant he’d smeared grease through his hair. Sumiko could smell it from where she was sitting across the table. And he was actually wearing gold suspenders a girlfriend had made him. Tee-hee! He liked girls and gambling, and he spent a lot of his money on clothes. Sumiko couldn’t imagine why girls would like gold suspenders and greasy hair; still, she had to admit it suited Ichiro. But he was just as handsome in overalls.

Bull’s hair was a
big
mess, like it always was after his bath. Before his bath his hair was usually a
small
mess. He did try to comb it in the mornings, but the combing didn’t “take” because his hair was bristly as a horse brush.

Sumiko often marveled over how different Ichiro and Bull were. Bull didn’t even pick out his own clothes—Auntie made him overalls and shirts. He rarely went out for fun except when he played baseball with other
Nikkei
. He did have a girlfriend a couple of years ago, but Sumiko didn’t know what had become of that. Ichiro, on the other hand, went out with girls all the time. But the point was, Ichiro knew a lot of people and heard all the important rumors.

One “rumor” that was not a rumor: Last August a U.S. congressman had suggested that ten thousand Japanese Americans ought to be incarcerated and held as hostages to make sure Japan would not act in a hostile manner toward the United States. Sumiko remembered when they’d all heard that on the radio. Auntie had exclaimed, “Law-abiding citizens held hostage!” The grown-ups had discussed that for weeks. Sumiko did not believe it was possible. White people treated her fairly enough. In fact, there was a lady at the grocery store who gave her a free apple once.

Sumiko swallowed some rice. “A white lady gave me an apple once,” she said.

Everybody just looked at her uncomprehendingly.

“Mother, I need to get going,” Ichiro said.

Auntie said, “We’re almost finished.”

They frowned at each other.

Jiichan took out his teeth and looked at them and put them back in. Sumiko moved her eyes to Auntie to see her reaction. Auntie laid the palm of her right hand softly against her heart, as if she were having a mild attack.