by Sarah Bird
“Moe?”
“Yes, poopsie.”
“Make designs, okay?”
“Sure, poops.”
She turned off the light and painted patterns in the darkness with the orange tip of her cigarette. Tracers of ack-ack fire arced through the night, zipping about in roller-coasting slides of light that blurred as the Dramamine dazed me back toward sleep. I thought I said the word “Sing,” but couldn’t be sure, as Moe seemed to start crooning before I could open my mouth. She sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and I saw her with her fifteen girlfriends perched about in a jungle of damp underwear, all singing, all in it together, as they crossed the Atlantic headed for Casablanca. My mother’s throbbing, Judy Garlandesque voice and smell—earthy, rich with grown-up-lady pleasures and secrets—blended together. Her face was the moon, lit by comet flashes of a swirling cigarette, shining down on a perfect world.
The memory flashes past in seconds and I am again on a plane moments away from falling into the East China Sea.
“Boy, howdy.” The sound in the cabin returns. “Tell you what, better get our shocks checked out.” The pilot’s casual, folksy tone mocks our noncombatant terror. “Got a little bumpy back there. Stewardesses, if you will, prepare the cabin for landing.”
It takes the Jesus woman a second to unloose the death grip she has on the older stewardess, whose face has turned the color of window putty. She straightens up and slings a few bags back into the overhead bins, slams them shut, and looks behind her. The aisle is clogged with disgorged bags. The veteran stew shakes her head and goes to the front of the cabin, where she sits stiffly next to her cowardly colleague.
My ears pop as we descend through shifting strata of clouds. Outside the window, Okinawa has grown only to the size of a white scarf and lightning still sizzles past the window. As we break through the cloud deck, though, my head fills with the smells of Baby Magic, Kool cigarettes, tangerines, caramelized sugar, honeysuckle, and Fumiko’s Young Pinkoo lipstick, and I no longer have the slightest doubt that we will land safely.
Brasso
Within seconds the stark utilitarianism of the terminal at Kadena Air Base wipes out my entire past year of life as a civilian. Cinder-block walls are painted a dispirited tan. Standing ashtrays are made of hundred-pound bombs. Arrows stenciled in black on the walls order me unequivocally toward the reception area. Other signs bark out acronyms, squadron names, unit designations, the whole vast hieroglyphic that orchestrates every twitch of military life. Because I’ve been away for a year, because I’ve been in a society that contains as many women as men, I notice now what had always before seemed normal, the overwhelming hordes of young males everywhere.
Then, ahead in the waiting area, I see them—my mother, my three brothers, my youngest sister—bunched together beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of the low-roofed terminal. I pause for a second to absorb the shock of discovering that five members of my family have been kidnapped and replaced by a troupe of bad actors.
The actors impersonating my twelve-year-old twin brothers, Buzz and Abner, are too tall, too lanky. Instead of the boys I’d said good-bye to only one year ago, these impostors show impossible yards of bony shanks and knobby knees. The reedy boys with piping voices are now being played by jut-jawed youths, foreheads and cheeks spangled with acne, Adam’s apples starting to poke out.
My youngest sister, Bosco, and brother, Bob, are unrecognizable. Intellectually, I accept that they’re one year older now—ten and seven—but it seems impossible they could have mutated so thoroughly in such a short time. Bob was still a plushly padded little boy with golden ringlets when I’d left. He now looks like a junior version of my father and the twins, already turning gangly, his hair buzzed into the crew cut that our father calls the “cut of the young athlete.”
Looking at Bosco, my bookworm sister, I see why Kit calls her Bernie, Jr. A new pair of plastic government-issue glasses dominates her pale, anxious face. She’s already developed my trademark dark circles under her eyes, testament to too many nights sneaking out of bed after everyone is asleep to continue studying for the geography test because she suddenly can’t recall the three major exports of Bolivia.
By far the most unconvincing member of this body-snatching troupe is playing my mother. For Moe, they should have gotten Elizabeth Taylor from sometime between Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8. Instead, they’ve ordered up the bloated, blowsy Liz of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As if Moe has been stealing all her skinny children’s food, she is easily forty pounds too heavy. Replacing my mother’s sparkle, this glassy-eyed stranger has a stunned and stuporous mien. Even in the subtropical heat of Okinawa, though, Moe is wearing a girdle, hose, heels, makeup, and white gloves. Wives of majors who wish to make colonel wear heels and hose in public.
Someone is missing, and for just a sliver of a second it is Fumiko I expect to see waiting with my family. But, of course, Kit is the one who is not there.
And then they catch sight of me as I approach, and I see in my family’s gape-jawed stares that I am the biggest impostor at this reunion. I reach them and no one says a word. The Okinawa heat presses on us, soggy and airless.
“Hey you, knucklehead.” I rub Bob’s bristly scalp with my fist. “Did you get your head caught in the lawn mower?”
“Hey, Bernie, sisterman, how’s things back in the world?” Abner puts on his joke hip GI voice and shoots me a peace sign. “What’s shaking stateside? What’s the haps, baby?”
“Hey, Abner, brotherman, you haven’t changed. Still dumb as a stump. I like that in a man.”
“That and total lack of personal hygiene,” Buzz throws in. “Don’t forget his other big plus.”
“Bernie,” Abner asks, “can a person actually purchase a pair of jeans like those, or do they have to do like you did and just wait for the previous owner to die?”
I turn to Buzz. “Buzz-tardo, this one offends me.” I point a languid finger toward Abner who twitches and cringes in terror. “Hasten demise, Buzz-tardo.”
Buzz slips immediately into one of our favorite routines, Zombie and Bitch Goddess of the Underworld. Buzz’s eyes glaze over, he holds his arms out straight, and shuffles toward Abner muttering, “Hasten demise. Hasten demise. Yes, O Bitch Goddess.” As Buzz chokes his twin to death, it’s like we’ve never been apart.
This seems to break the spell. Bob and Bosco leave Moe’s side and crush me with sweet kid hugs that smell of Coppertone and caramel. All my siblings except Kit huddle up next to me like puppies in a litter. I feel as if a missing limb has been reattached.
Moe steps forward and the huddle breaks apart. She wraps me in a damp embrace that has the dense, overpacked feel of flesh compressed by a Playtex girdle and runs her hand along my back. “I see we’re not wearing a bra.” This is not the first thing Moe, the mother from the S.S. President Wilson, from the little house in Fussa, my real mother, would say to me after we’d been apart for a year. She would have known I’d almost died trying to return to her.
At that moment, the bathroom door swings open and the biggest surprise casting yet emerges. Kit is being played by Lolita. In one year, she has gone from a sixteen-year-old in braces to a voluptuary. Given that her last words, whispered to me on the morning my family left for the other side of the earth, were, “My prayers have been answered. Actually, I prayed that you would die, but this is good enough,” I wasn’t expecting much of a welcome.
I brace myself as Kit comes toward me with her arms spread wide. As she crushes me in a hug, I notice that my little sister smells heavily of Tabu cologne and sloe gin. Kit whispers her own observations.
“You reek of pot. What were you doing, toking up all the way over here? Are you holding?”
“What are you talking about?” Pot-smoking was a campus activity I hadn’t participated in, requiring, as it did, contact with outsiders.
Kit rolls her eyes. She is wearing a Villager outfit I’d handed down to her. The Peter Pan collar, knee socks, and ox
blood Weejuns had emphasized my mousy bookwormishness. The same outfit on Kit makes her look like a baby porn queen in Catholic schoolgirl drag. All she needs is a big cherry lollipop and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses.
“Holding?” I repeat, incredulous.
She pops her throttled eyes in exasperation. “Never mind. Coals to you know, that place where they already have a ton of coal. Why bother bringing some crappy Mexican pot to the drug delta of the universe?”
I have no answer to that question.
“Besides, only losers and noncoms smoke dope.”
Kit was born finely tuned to the nuances of social ranking, a tendency that life as a military brat has exacerbated in interesting ways. I glance from my glassy-eyed mother to my glassy-eyed sister and add my own coda to her decree: And Post Princesses drink. And their mothers take pills.
“Oh, you girls are friends again,” Moe coos, as if a year apart could change the fact that nine months in her womb are the only thing on this earth we have in common.
A bowlegged Okinawan man with a wobbly-wheeled cart overloaded with luggage teeters toward us. In the split second that my brain is occupied with worrying whether my Lady Baltimore suitcase with the giant daisy decal will topple off the top of the cart, I catch a flashing glimpse of knuckled hand, square nails, gold wedding band, aviator’s watch, and the splinter of a memory enters my mind.
I am ten, the last year we lived in Japan, and I am wearing my Girl Scout uniform. My father kneels in front of me adjusting my merit badge sash before we enter the Father/Daughter Banquet held in the Yokota Air Base Teen Center.
“Hey, troop.” He called all of his children “troop.” It usually, but not always, meant he was joking. “Your Sharpshooter badge is crooked.”
“Girl Scouts don’t have Sharpshooter badges.” I reach down and touch the badge. “See, that’s for Pet Care.”
He tapped my nose. “Made you look.”
For that second, the smiling, loose-limbed man who joked and tapped my nose walks toward me leading the Okinawan luggage carrier our way. Then my father snaps his fingers with a crack like a rifle firing and the young captain he had been in Japan vanishes. At each crack, my father points from the twins to the luggage cart.
“Cut the happy chatter and go get your sister’s luggage.”
Unlike the rest of his family, my father looks precisely the way he did when they left a year ago. He stands ramrod straight in starched khakis, his hair in a crew cut, black shoes shined to a mirror finish, the smell of Brasso wafting off his polished belt buckle. It doesn’t appear that his weight has fluctuated more than six ounces or his hair been allowed to grow an extra millimeter.
My father looks at me and blinks, clearing away, no doubt, the image of the Brownie he once knelt in front of. He gives me a quick hug and asks how the flight was. I think about the lightning sizzling past my window, about believing I was going to die, but all I can say is, “Fine.”
The twins start pretending to strangle each other and droning “Hasten demise” in zombie voices until my father barks at them. “Cut the wise-assery.”
He hates the “wise-assery” that is our main mode of interaction, even though we learned all the basic tropes from him.
“Get your sister’s luggage.”
“Which ones are hers?”
“They’re the ones with the—uh, big daisy decals.” I point to the suitcases, carefully selected from the BX for my high school graduation present, now covered in stick-ons.
My father looks dubiously at me before he moves the twins out. My family is not good at public appearances and, for a military family, every time you set foot out of the house is a public appearance.
He turns to Moe. “Get your daughter into some slacks where her ass isn’t hanging out. She looks like a peace puke.”
With two more cracking finger snaps, my father gets our attention, then hacks the air with a finger pointing toward the exit. Without a word, we all form up and follow him out of the terminal.
Outside, the subtropical Okinawan air is unbreathably humid. It halos the lights in the parking lot like fog. I spot Frenchie, our Oldsmobile station wagon, named for its dung-hued mustard color. My heart leaps. Frenchie is as close as we ever came to the family dog we’ve all lobbied for but could never have because we move so often. My father drops my suitcase beside our car and turns to me. He has his hand extended out like a Roman senator about to deliver an oration. “Time?”
“Dad,” Abner starts to groan, but my father silences him with a look and Moe, my brothers and sisters, even Kit, glance down at their watches and pincer out the stems. Then my father notices me.
“Where’s your watch?” he asks. My lack of undergarments pales in comparison to this absence. Quickly, I dig my silver Seiko with the black grosgrain band, bought in Tokyo when I was ten, right before we left Japan, out of my leather-fringed shoulder bag. I haven’t worn it for the past year. Love beads and Seiko watches do not go together.
The watch is our family totem. Kit has a Seiko exactly like mine except that she’s traded the band in for a silver mesh type. The twins both have on the new thing—quartz watches with twisty gold bands and the time broadcast in chunky numbers in a window on the face. Bob, who worships his big brothers, wears the same kind except that, even tightened as far as the band will go, the watch still looks like a handcuff on his spindly wrist. It slides down to his elbow when he raises his hand. Bosco has on a pink plastic Hello Kitty model. My mother wears her dress-up gold Longines with a face no bigger than a fingernail that had been my father’s fifth anniversary present to her. Her everyday watch is her “nurse’s watch,” a man’s Timex with a sweep second hand for taking pulses.
My father wears the aviator’s watch he’d been issued at flight school at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, the watch he wore while he copiloted planes through World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War. Once a month, with ceremonial gravity, he calls the atomic clock to nudge the instrument one or two seconds into keeping with Greenwich mean time.
“Synchronize.”
We all bend our heads over our watches.
“Synchronize.”
I pull out the stem on my Seiko and wait until my father announces, “I make it twenty-three hundred hours and thirty-three minutes in …”—we all move the minute hands of our watches to that position—“five, four, three, two, one, now!”
All eight of us snap our stems down on the same exact second. I set my watch and fall back into time with my family.
Diesel
“Hey, Joe, you want short time? Fi’e dollar, I be you girlfriend. You want three-holer? I do three-holer.” We are trapped in a late-night traffic jam in Koza, the Okinawan town outside Kadena’s Gate Three. The station wagon fills with the diesel and open-sewer smells of a Mexican border town.
“Whose bright idea was it to come into the ville?” my father asks in tones etched in acid, even though he knows it was Moe’s idea. “We had to show Bernadette the ville tonight. It had to be tonight. What? You think she should apply for a summer job here?” He reaches over the seat and, with furious turns, rolls up Abner’s window so quickly that the prostitute sticking her face in bumps her beehive trying to keep from being guillotined.
“Mace, come on.” A year away makes me notice what no one else hears, the note of hopelessness in Moe’s supplicating tone.
All around our station wagon, tiny Japanese cars honk. The prostitute, a petite Okinawan woman in short shorts, halter top, and platform mules waves at Abner. When she has his attention, she turns around, bends over, and shakes her ass at him. All of Abner’s face turns as red as his pimples.
Outside, the whore and her papa-san, a tough pimp in rubber zoris and a T-shirt with the inscription I MAY NOT GO DOWN IN HISTORY, BUT I’LL GO DOWN ON YOUR LITTLE SISTER! roar with laughter. Koza is like a low-rent tropical Bourbon Street populated by roving groups of GIs. The white boys are unmistakable in their newly plucked haircuts, JCPenney Dacron shirts and trousers, an
d the twitchy air that comes from their effort to channel homesickness and vulnerability into swaggering machismo.
Pawnshops, tattoo parlors, tailor shops, and optical, electronics, and T-shirt shops are scattered among the bars: Ace High, Okay Joe, New Pussycat No. 3, Gentilemans Club, Stateside Bar. Promises of SEXY FLORR SHOW! or GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! or GO-GO SHOW! are illustrated with posters of dark-haired girls—either totally naked or encumbered only with go-go boots, pink baby dolls, and a whip—thrusting out perfect breasts.
Moe turns to face me. “Koza’s not usually this—ahem—lively when we’re here.”
“Lively?” My father catches my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Tell your mother she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is the decline of Western civilization passing in review.”
Again, no one but me seems to notice our parents’ habit of talking to each other through us. I try to remember when it started. I know they spoke when we were at Yokota. They spoke, they danced, they shared “loving cups” and “togetherness.”
A group of black servicemen in locally tailored suits of lavender, lime green, coral, and electric blue strut past. Bar girls flood out of the Harlem Club. My father watches the girls tug the men inside.
“There’s your American fighting man. There’s your sentinel of liberty.”
For a second, my heart clutches, and before I can figure out why, my head fills with the burnt sugar and citrus smell of the candied tangerines Fumiko made for me when we lived in the little house in Fussa. Lounging against a light pole is, I’m sure of it, Fumiko. Her back is to us, but I recognize the high ponytail she took to wearing after she abandoned her kimono in favor of sweaters, pedal pushers, and bobby socks.