by Nina Revoyr
CHAPTER TWO
LOIS—1994, 1963
SHE SAW him everywhere, at different ages, in different incarnations. It was like the soundless scenes played at the end of certain movies, flashing on and off the screen while the credits rolled. Today the scenes starred Jackie as tiny granddaughter, maybe because Lois had spent the whole day with her, like they used to with Frank twenty years ago, afternoons and outings and dinners at home that her niece didn’t even remember.
But Lois did. Small snippets of memory, like cut-up film. Frank handing out cigars when Jackie was born, laughing aloud and then suddenly weeping, as if he already knew she’d be his only grandchild. Frank stomping around the house in Gardena, roaring, pretending he was a monster, waggling his sawed-off foot or half-finger in Jackie’s face. Frank and Jackie in the bowling alley, he encouraging her as she squatted behind the heavy ball, pushed it with both hands, jumped up and down as she watched it roll right into the gutter. Frank and Jackie a couple of years later, leaning over the railing at the Redondo Beach Pier. She was riding on his shoulders, legs hooked over his chest, fingers trying to get a hold in his crew-cut hair. He with his sun-browned hands wrapped around each of her legs. Lois beside them getting nervous as Frank leaned over the railing to watch a fish flipping on someone’s hook, her niece draped over his head, hanging, tipping out over the water. Lois yelled, “Dad!” and then felt silly as he stood up straight, snapped the child back onto the pier, saying, “What?” And then they’d fished, the three of them, sitting in lawn chairs and holding the bamboo poles that Frank had made himself, nodding them up and down, back and forth, like divining rods. Jackie’s mother was in medical school then, her father already a doctor, so it often fell to Frank or Lois—who was slowly finishing college—to take care of Rose’s child. To try and show her something different from the gilded, tree-lined world they both knew she was going to grow up in.
Lois remembered the day her family had divided. Looking back, she could see that it had been happening for years, but one Saturday morning in 1963, each member of the family had fallen clearly in one direction or the other.
She was twelve years old, and her older sister was playing for the under-fifteen championship of the Japanese Tennis League. Lois—who was in charge of equipment—had accidentally grabbed Rose’s practice shoes before running out to the car; they looked the same as the ones her sister wore for matches. And later, as they pulled up to the tennis court in Gardena, Lois knew her whole family was mad at her. Rose would hardly look at her, hadn’t spoken since she’d flipped her ponytail in exasperation and cried, “Lo-is! How could you be so dumb!” Her mother had been tight-lipped, informing her, simply, “This is a very important match, Lois. I hope you didn’t ruin it for your sister.” Even her grandmother Sakai, who never yelled at anyone, still added to the general air of disapproval. Only her father had refrained from scolding her, trying instead to mollify his eldest, telling her the practice shoes weren’t really that much older; their traction should be fine on the nice new court.
Although Lois felt bad about the shoes and wished that someone would talk to her, she wasn’t worried about how her sister would do in the match. She didn’t care much for tennis. She hated the bright white skirts, the pressed blouses, the scrubbed-clean quality of all the girls who played. And she hated leaving Crenshaw to come down to Gardena, where everyone lived in big, bland houses; where all the boys her age were already talking about college and becoming doctors, and all the girls spoke of make-up tips and Barbie dolls. After their father parked the car, Rose ran off to talk to some girls she knew. Their mother’s parents lived here in Gardena now—they’d closed the restaurant in Little Tokyo and opened another one over on Western—and the whole family came down to visit often enough for Rose to make some new friends. Her sister wanted to move here, Lois knew; every weekend her Gardena friends would pick her up in their cars, and Rose always returned from these excursions sighing and sad, looking out the window for hours.
Lois, her parents, and her grandma Sakai found seats in the shiny aluminum stands. Frank and Mary exchanged pleasantries with some other parents they knew, including Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda, the parents of Stephanie Ikeda, the girl Rose would be facing in the championship. Mary put the red and white cooler of sushi on the bench between herself and Lois, and Lois looked at it, stomach rumbling. The big Japanese-style picnic which followed these matches was the only thing that made them bearable.
“I wish you would take up tennis,” Mary said. “Or bowling. Something where you’d make some good friends.”
“I have friends,” Lois replied, thinking of Chris, with the gap where his tooth had been punched out, and Janie, with the always-skinned knees.
“Yes, but they’re not nice friends.”
Lois sighed. She’d heard all of this before. At twelve, she was a tomboy, usually outside and almost always dirty. To her, the greatest joy in life was running loose in the neighborhood. She loved the Crenshaw district, and she loved her father’s stories about how much it had changed over the years, since the time it was known as Angeles Mesa. It was filled with houses now, and crowded with all different sorts of families. But Frank described a neighborhood of huge, open spaces; of fewer and heartier people. For Lois, going down to Gardena, which was stiff and all-Japanese, was like going to church—something she knew she should do and appreciate, but which bored her to the point of sleep.
After an interminable warm-up period, a short man wearing a golf visor introduced the two players and everyone in the crowd clapped politely. The match began. Rose seemed nervous at first, and Lois feared she was distracted by the fit of her shoes, but then she settled in, as she always did, placing the ball perfectly on almost every shot. It was so quiet that Lois could hear the creak of a swing set on the other side of the park, chain links shifting and straining. Every time Stephanie Ikeda hit the ball, she emitted a small grunt, like she’d been punched in the stomach, and Lois saw her own mother shake her head a little, glad her daughter didn’t make such ugly noises. The whole crowd cheered when a point was won, and Rose took the first set in half an hour.
At the break, the people in the stands started into a quiet chatter, analyzing the first set, debating a questionable call made by one of the judges. Lois saw the gray clouds moving over them, closing and unclosing like fists, and she wondered if it was going to start raining. Her parents exchanged a few words and then fell silent again, and Lois thought, watching them, not for the first time, that she never wanted to marry. Marriage, to her, meant what her parents had—steadiness, like a small efficient business. Her parents never fought, but they didn’t hug either, or talk about anything that wasn’t related to the family or work. She knew that love could be more than that—more like Christy Hara and John Oyama from high school, who would vanish into Christy’s house in the afternoon and come out an hour later looking happy and relaxed; or like Dexter Coleman’s parents, who lived together but had never married, and who still cooked for each other, and sang songs together, and yelled, “Hey, baby!” when they met on the street.
Steadiness, in any form, was stifling to her. She liked the extreme, the inexplicable, the ridiculous and evil. She liked her Grandma and Grandpa Takayas’ stories of the hustlers and pimps they served in the old days in Little Tokyo; of the gambling house where they wouldn’t let Mary make deliveries because of the desperate, devious men and shady women. She liked their stories of nine-month winters and planting rice on early mornings in Japan, and her grandmother Sakai’s tales of surviving on locusts, fried for crispness or boiled for soup. They were citizens now, all of them, transformed into Americans at the mass naturalization ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in ’54, but to Lois their stories of old Japan were like the best kind of fairy tales—fantastical, with familiar elements and odd but recognizable characters.
During the second set, Lois’s attention wandered. She looked around at all the well-dressed husbands and wives, the tiny grandmothers with their plain, drab Western cloth
es and their bright, patterned Japanese fans. She watched a couple of bored-looking wives glance over at her father, who she knew was handsomer than any Gardena man. A better father, too, she believed. He was at the store every night until eight or nine, but then he was always at home, telling stories, teasing his daughters, never going out for drinks or card games like the other Nisei fathers she knew. He even took her to baseball games sometimes at Dodger Stadium, and before that, when the team had just moved out from Brooklyn, right over at the Olympic Coliseum. Rose, of course, wasn’t interested in baseball, but once or twice a summer, Frank and his friend Victor gathered a big group of kids and drove them all up to a game. Lois loved being around the men, for any reason—the deep sweet smell of Victor’s pipe, the easy way her father laughed when they sat on the stoop of Victor’s house, always made her feel secure. The two of them together were a sight to see, especially her father’s friend—all the women in the neighborhood, from fifteen to fifty, threw more sway in their hips, more spice and honey in their voices, when Victor Conway came around.
At the break between the second and third sets—Stephanie Ikeda had taken the second set 6-3—Lois asked her mother where the bathroom was. Mary pointed at a small tan building about a hundred feet away from the court. “Can’t you wait?” she asked. Lois said that she couldn’t. “Hurry back,” her mother said.
Lois barely made it to the bathroom in time, and when she was done, she had no desire to get back to the stands. So she dawdled, distracted by a game of volleyball; by a picnic; by a particularly proud and vocal robin. Every so often she looked over at the tennis court and saw the slim white-clad bodies flitting around on the sea-green concrete. When she was about thirty feet away, a small golden puppy came up to her, dragging a leather leash. Lois crouched down to greet her. The dog jumped up, put its front paws on her shoulders, and thoroughly washed her face with its tongue. The owner appeared soon after and disengaged the leash, saying that Lois could play with her for a while. So Lois skipped around, leading the dog in a circle, pretending it was hers. She could hear the announcer over at the court saying the set was tied 5-5. Lois knew she should see the end of the match, so she started back over to the court, but the puppy, ignoring its owner, continued to follow her. Then the dog caught sight of the tennis ball. Rose was bouncing it, preparing to serve, and the puppy, following some ancient, blood-deep impulse, took off toward the court at a sprint. “Wait!” Lois yelled after her, but it was Rose who turned, upon completing her serve, and so she completely missed her opponent’s return. Worse, the ball skittered off her end of the court and the puppy pounced on it, growling happily. The entire crowd burst into laughter. Rose went after her, but the dog commenced a game of keep-away, getting close to Rose, then jumping back again, Rose lunging in desperation. The crowd continued to laugh, and Rose to chase, until finally the owner appeared and grabbed the dog by the collar. He pried the ball loose from the puppy’s jaws and handed it sheepishly back to Rose. She grimaced at the thing, which was now covered with dirt and saliva, and then glared at Lois, who was standing to the side of the crowd, trying hard to disappear. Rose went back to the court, took out a new ball, and attempted to regain her composure, and the crowd’s laughter quieted down to a still-amused titter. The last point had put Rose down 30-40, and now, distracted, she double-faulted. It was 5-6. Stephanie Ikeda had serve, and Rose never recovered. She dropped the last game, love-40, and lost the match in three sets.
On the car ride home, Lois slumped in the back seat and suffered yet another berating from her sister and mother. Rose was almost hysterical, complaining to her parents about how Lois was a brat, and a bad student, and she was trying to ruin her life, and Mary scolded Lois for spoiling her sister’s day. Lois felt small, the bad daughter. Even her grandmother refused to look at her. But then, in the middle of this barrage, she caught Frank’s eye in the rearview mirror. He’d laughed right along with the rest of the crowd when the puppy went after the ball. Now Lois saw that his eyes were still laughing, despite his immobile face. He looked at her in the rearview mirror, not adding to the din of voices. Then he winked. And in that moment, as they drove up Crenshaw and back toward their house, although she didn’t say anything or even return the gesture, she felt the weight of everyone else’s fury lift off her, and became her father’s child.
End of Excerpt
More about Southland
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Southland is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
LAist’s “20 Novels That Dared to Define a Different Los Angeles
Winner of the American Library Association's Stonewall Honor Award in Literature
Nominated for an Edgar Award
Selected for the LA Times Best Book of 2003 List
Nominated for the LA Times Book Prize
Nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Literary Award
Nominated for a Lambda Literary Award
A Book Sense 76 Pick
InsightOut Book Club Selection
"The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel . . . But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page." —Los Angeles Times
"If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list . . . With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious . . ." —Booklist (starred review)
"Compelling . . . never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr's reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in LA." —Publishers Weekly
"What makes a book like Southland resonate is that it merges elements of literature and social history with the propulsive drive of a mystery, while evoking Southern California as a character, a key player in the tale. Such aesthetics have motivated other Southland writers, most notably Walter Mosley." —Los Angeles Times
"Fascinating and heartbreaking . . . an essential part of LA history." —LA Weekly
"Read this book and tell me you don't want to read more. I know I do." —Dorothy Allison
". . . subtle, effective . . . [with] a satisfyingly unpredictable climax." —Washington Post
"An engaging, thoughtful book that even East Coasters can enjoy." —New York Press
"Dead-on descriptions of California both gritty and golden." —East Bay Express
"Southland gripped my attention and would not let go until I turned the last page." —International Examiner
"A remarkable feat." —Susan Straight
"Southland is a simmering stew of individual dreams, family struggles, cultural relations, social changes, and race relations. It is a compelling, challenging, and rewarding novel." —Chicago Free Press
Nina Revoyr brings us a compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four black teenagers were killed in the store he ran during the Watts Riots of 1965—and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys' deaths. In the process, Jackie unearths the long-held secrets of her family's history—and her own. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.
Also available by Nina Revoyr: Wingshooters
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The Age of Dreaming is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar booksto
res everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
A Booklist Book of the Year 2011
Finalist for SCIBA's 2011 Fiction Award
Winner of the 2011 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award
Winner of the first annual Indie Booksellers Choice Award
Selected for IndieBound's March 2011 Indie Next List, "Great Reads from Booksellers You Trust"
Featured in O, The Oprah Magazine's March 2011 Reading Room section as one of 10 Titles to Pick Up Now
"Revoyr does a remarkable job of conveying [protagonist] Michelle's lost innocence and fear through this accomplished story of family and the dangers of complacency in the face of questionable justice." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Revoyr writes rhapsodically of a young girl's enthrallment to the natural world and charts, with rising intensity, her resilient narrator's painful awakening to human failings and senseless violence. In this shattering northern variation on To Kill A Mockingbird, Revoyr drives to the very heart of tragic ignorance, unreason, and savagery." —Booklist (starred review)
"Hauntingly provocative . . . an excellent choice for book discussion groups as it will force readers to dig deep and look inward." —Library Journal
"Gripping and insightful." —Kirkus Reviews
"A searing, anguished novel . . . The narration and pace are expertly calibrated as it explores a topic one wishes still wasn't so current." —Los Angeles Times
"Much can be said and commended about the book's themes of loyalty and love . . . I'll just say that this author is a big talent. Her book is a little thing of beauty. It's a story with American historical significance; it's a novel with emotional heft; it's a satisfying read in the spirit of what Picasso said about another writer, James Joyce: 'The incomprehensible that everyone can understand.'" —Brooklyn Rail