by Sarah Bird
The twins and Bosco were taking naps. Kit was outside. Even the heat couldn’t stop the worshipful gang of little girls who began beating on our door early in the morning demanding that Kit come out and transform them into a herd of wild mustangs that would thunder about her, their leader. Or into a corps of dancers who would writhe on the ground dying as Kit, the only caterpillar to live, would burst from her chrysalis into exquisite butterfly flight. It amazed me how, even that young, Kit had the power to convince her besotted playmates that it was the most fun imaginable to be a slave and build a pyramid for her, the mighty pharaoh. She could sometimes even get her acolytes—who included Lisa Wingo, Major Wingo’s daughter, and the second most popular girl, as well as Debbie Coulter and Sheryl Dugan, daughters of other members of our father’s flight crew—to play her favorite game, Elvis, and simply roll around on the grass screaming out adulation for her, the Queen.
That morning, Moe, Fumiko, and I finished the housework early, dancing through our dusting with Mahalia Jackson singing about God having the whole world in his hands. We were sitting at the table eating broiled bologna and cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drinking Coke out of little bottles when Fumiko shared the secret with us for making Pink Cokes, the best Coke anyone ever drank. It was Shiseido’s Young Pinkoo.
“Make your lips like this,” Fumiko instructed me, stretching her own full lips over her teeth as she held her tube of Young Pinkoo beside her head like an artist with a brush. Young Pinkoo was the favorite lipstick among Japanese women for many postwar years. It was the color of cherry blossoms and had a scent with the warm, waxy appeal of my Crayolas, spiked with elements more sophisticated, grown-up, and dangerous but which, in the end, just smelled pink in the mysteriously contrived way of women while crayons and flowers and iced cookies smelled pink in a dismissably childish way.
I imitated her. Fumiko breathed talcum powder and rice crackers on me as she carefully applied the lipstick then handed it to Moe, who put it on herself, making the face of Tragedy like she always did to apply lipstick. Usually Moe blotted her lipstick thoroughly afterward, leaving fallen petals of rose-kissed Kleenex behind. But not this time. This time, we all looked at each other, our lips the color of Hostess Sno-balls, me dreaming that I’d grow up and be as beautiful as Moe, as Fumiko, then pressed the mouths of the Coke bottle against our own and drank the Young Pinkoo–flavored soda.
“My God, Fumiko,” Moe said, staring at the squat bottle, its neck ringed in waxy pink. “You’re right. That is the best Coke I have ever had in my life.”
“Me too,” I marveled. “Pink Coke.”
Fumiko reddened with pleasure at our compliments.
“Fumiko,” Moe said, draining her bottle, “let’s get another treatment in before the twins wake up.”
These “treatments” of Moe’s were a major production that could only be done with Fumiko’s help. Back in the parents’ room, Fumiko quickly set up a machine called the Metabo-Liter that had arrived in a large, wooden crate last month. Moe stepped out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel turban, wearing only her bra and panties. Her tummy was soft and caved-in from having five babies, like a balloon blown up too much, then popped. Fumiko untangled a mass of wires that led from the heavy control box to banners of rubber. Moe wrapped rubber strips around her thighs, then another one around her tummy. Swaddled like a mummy in the flesh-colored rubber, she stretched out on the table. Fumiko attached wire leads to each long strip and plugged them all into the control box. She fiddled with the many dials on the control box, and a steady buzz hummed through the bedroom.
“A little bit more,” Moe said, and Fumiko turned the dial up until the hum hit a higher pitch. “Ee-yow! You’re electrocuting me!” Moe yelped, making Fumiko laugh out loud. It took Moe most of the four years that Fumiko was with us to get her to make a sound when she was amused, but she’d finally succeeded. Fumiko’s laugh was startling, a horsy whinny unlike any other laugh I’d ever heard. Fumiko only laughed that way when she was alone with Moe and me. Her staccato whinny never failed to crack Moe up, so that she and Fumiko would end up laughing until one of them either wet her pants or cried. As their laughter subsided to odd snorts and titters, I studied the Metabo-Liter.
I didn’t understand the exact scientific principles behind the Metabo-Liter, but the whole procedure of Moe yelping and electricity being shot through her flab bore a creepy resemblance to the Bride of Frankenstein.
“Hey! I get one too!” Kit, her pale hair clinging in a sweat-darkened frame around her face, flushed a sunrise pink, burst into the bedroom, pouting and holding one of the empty Coke bottles. At that exact instant, the twins, as they always seemed to, woke up together, screaming in stereo.
“Shit,” Moe hissed, glancing at the rubber wraps it had taken ten minutes to girdle herself in. “Bernie, could you, please, take the twins to the playground before they wake up the baby?”
I pushed Buzz’s stroller and Kit pushed Abner’s through the heat. The walk to the playground took us out of officers’ housing into the noncoms’ area. Here families didn’t live in their own houses; they shared two-story apartment buildings that looked like the barracks where the GIs lived. Each building squatted on flat land unadorned by trees and shrubs. Lawn furniture sat out front, along with bicycles dropped on the dirt, pull toys, and broken barbecues, debris unimaginable in the officers’ section. A group of mothers lounged on webbed lawn chairs in their front yards, smoking and yelling at their children. A couple of the women even held cans of beer.
As we wheeled past, first the mothers, then the children, fell silent and stared at us. It wasn’t because our faces were unfamiliar. New faces are the norm in military neighborhoods where a family can be packed up and moved away overnight if the assignment is urgent or the scandal great enough. No, we exuded an indefinable quality that marked us as officer’s kids, alien outlanders in this neighborhood.
I wilted under the strangers’ stares, particularly that of an obese woman whose upper arms swung with a pendulous heft as she stroked a gray cat on her lap. Face prickling with embarrassment, I leaned into the stroller and pushed harder, rushing to escape their attention, to reach the neutral zone of the school playground. As always, however, Kit, with her bone-deep conviction that she was welcome anywhere, blossomed under the attention. To my intense chagrin, she lagged farther and farther behind until a gulf half a block long had opened up between us.
“Hey,” I heard her call out to the fat woman. “Is that a real monkey?”
I looked back to see Kit abandon Abner’s stroller and walk toward the clump of noncom wives, who all sat up a bit straighter in their chairs and flipped the damp hair off the backs of their necks at the approach of this little princess. In that instant, for the first time, I realized that whatever group my sister stepped into would always rearrange itself into a party for her. In the same moment, what I had taken to be a cat stood up on the woman’s lap and I saw it was a snow monkey, a fuzzy, big-eyed baby macaque from Kyoto.
Kit, believing that no primate could be immune to her charm, walked right up to it. With one shriek, the monkey launched itself off the woman’s lap directly into Kit’s face. The monkey, the women, Kit, Abner, and Buzz all screamed as the animal was peeled off Kit’s face. Blood streamed from her lips.
The monkey was killed; Kit had to have a series of rabies and tetanus shots. All the noncom wives visited and brought her dolls, and boxes of the soft Japanese crayons that could be smeared for foggy effects, and coloring books with special pages that you could just paint with water and a hitherto invisible picture would appear. Moe cried every time she looked at Kit’s bandaged face.
When the stitches came out, we witnessed a miracle. Kit had had what Moe called the Root Lip, an upper lip thin as a dog’s. It was her only defect. The baby monkey’s tiny front teeth had sunk in above Kit’s lip at precisely the spot where the bow of an upper lip should have been and punched one in. Somehow, the shiny red scars never completely faded, so that Kit’s u
pper lip ever after looked as plump and bee-stung as Fumiko’s had the day she showed us how to make Pink Cokes.
Fries
Island-Wide
DANCE CONTEST!!
Win an all-expenses-paid trip to
Tokyo, Japan!!!
To accompany internationally renowned comedian
BOBBY MOSES!!!!
Far East Funnyman Three Years Running!!!
On his sold-out Fourth-of-July Tour
of the
LAND OF THE RISING SUN!!!
“Is this the thing Kit is going to win?” I ask, reading the flier taped to the outside wall of the neighborhood snack bar, the Scoop ’n’ Skillet. Bosco and I stand next to the small, screened order window. A stream of chilled air blows out, carrying the smell of grilling hamburgers, fries, and fermented ketchup.
“She’ll win. She wins everything she tries out for.”
“She’s never won Science Fair or a spelling bee,” I remind Bosco.
“Oh, well. Those.” Bosco waves her hand, dismissing the things she’s won. The same things I’d won.
“Whuh you wan?” A Ryukyuan woman, her silver hair pulled back in a bun, appears at the window.
“Bosco, I’m treating. What do you want? Hamburger?”
Bosco’s eyes widen in horror. “A hamburger? At the Poop ’n’ Kill It? Are you crazy?” She turns to the woman. “One Nutty Buddy, please.”
I get one too, and we continue on our expedition to the base stables to meet Hickory the Horse, following the broad sidewalks through the rolling green hills of officer housing. Maybe because for the first time in my life I’ve lived for the past year in a normal neighborhood, I notice what’s missing in an overseas military neighborhood.
Of course, most obvious is the complete lack, during working hours, of any male over the age of eighteen. And no old people at any time, ever. Someone’s grandparents coming for a visit is a major show-and-tell for the whole neighborhood. No mailmen, since your mail comes to an APO box and you pick it up. Outside dogs are as rare as grandparents. The occasional senior officer’s wife might have her matched set of Pekingese or Japanese Chins, but regular old yard dogs are encumbrances that overseas military families live without. Besides, a misplaced pile of poop could go on an Officer’s Efficiency Report as easily as any other infraction noted by the Housing Officer, who patrols regularly, noting whose lawn is overgrown with weeds, which family leaves Big Wheels in the flower bed, which house has screens hanging off the windows.
All of which explains why officers’ housing on Kadena Air Base resembles a very well maintained golf course, with grass kept as trim as the occupant officer’s own crew cut. No one, not even the base commander, has a fence around his yard, but around all the yards, around all the runways and parade grounds, are the miles of barbed fence that corrals us all.
At the edge of the housing area, Bosco moves a rock and exposes a hole dug beneath the fence. “This is my shortcut,” she tells me proudly, slithering under, then holding the bottom strand of wire up while I squirm through. On the other side of the fence, Okinawa waits in all its chaotic, semitropical lushness.
We enter a wooded ravine overgrown with vines looping down from a profusion of scrubby trees. Sweat dries almost instantly in the shady ravine cooled by the constant ocean breezes. A damp, fungal odor saturates the air.
“Do you ever wish you knew when the last time for something was going to be?” Bosco asks me. I’m concentrating on the path, watching for habu snakes, mongooses, unexploded ordnance, burning phosphorus, Anopheles mosquitoes. I remain alert to the signs of heatstroke.
“Like, I walk through this ravine every day to get to the stables,” Bosco goes on, as we thread our way around the thick vines that twine across the path. “But say I get a best friend and she hates walking through the ravine.” This hypothetical discussion of a best friend makes me feel sad for myself and for Bosco, who is as buddy-free as I am.
“So we go around and stay on the sidewalk the whole way to the stable and I never walk through the ravine again. Then, one day, when I’m grown up, I remember the ravine and this smell”—she pauses to identify it—“sort of between a gagging sewer smell and a sweet jasmine smell, and how it was all cool and dark in there even when it was hot and still in the sun, and I just stopped walking through it. Stopped walking through the ravine. There was no last time. I just stopped and never noticed.”
Bosco stares at me, distraught, burdened with the inevitability of this tragedy. Her voice rises as she goes on. “Think of all the last times that no one ever notices. You think you’ll play with your troll dolls forever, but one day you get a horse and you never play with them again, and you can’t even remember when the last time was because you don’t plan to stop playing with them. You just do and then you move and your mom throws them away because you’re over your weight allowance and you get to the new base and you don’t have your horse so now you want to play with your troll dolls, but they’re gone. They’re gone, and you can’t even remember the last time you played with them. They’re just gone.”
Bosco looks impossibly bereft thinking about her abandoned troll dolls.
“Look, Bosk, this is easy. You can control all these last times that are trying to gang up on you. When we get home, we’ll play with your trolls.”
“You don’t understand. The whole day is probably filled with last times you never even notice. I mean, this, this may be the last time I’ll ever eat a Nutty Buddy.” She studies the soggy tip of the melting cone with a mixture of adoration and betrayal as if this, this Nutty Buddy will be the one to do her wrong.
“I don’t know, Bosk. I actually see many Nutty Buddies in your future.”
Bosco’s face creases with woe. “Yeah, but sometime, someday, some Nutty Buddy will be the last.”
It is clear that my little sister needs some of the old snap put back in her garters. “Here’s a last for you, Bosco.” I pluck the last melting bit from her fingers and toss it away as we step out of the ravine. “This is the last time we’ll ever talk about Nutty Buddies. Okay?”
The sun pounds down, making sweat stream from my temples, between my breasts, armpits, spine. I even feel a trickle run down the back of my knee. A wall of what looks like very skinny bamboo or six-foot-tall Johnson grass appears on either side of the path. I whack at it with a stick.
“Don’t do that!” Bosco grabs the stick out of my hand. “That’s habu grass. Habu snakes live in there. Among the venomous snakes on Okinawa, the habu is the most deadly. Every year, there are approximately five hundred people bitten by habu snakes. The bite of the habu will cause paralyzing pain, swelling at the bite point, and internal hemorrhaging. The habu has a triangular-shaped head with a white belly. It averages two yards in length with a firm tail.” Bosco stares at me, hyperventilating.
“They brought the snakes here to kill the rats. But the snakes killed the people, so they brought mongooses. The plural is mongooses, not geese.” Bosco is talking fast and her eyes dart over my face, searching for answers even as she pours out her own. “But the snakes multiply too rapidly. The mongooses can’t kill them all. There aren’t enough of them. Besides which, mongooses, imported from India to control the deadly habu, have become a menace in and of themselves. Frequent carriers of rabies, they become insanely aggressive if infected. Annually, they bite in excess of four hundred people, who must then endure a painful course of rabies shots. They inhabit damp, secluded places like sugarcane fields, tombs, roadsides, walls, caves, and particularly their favored habitat—the habu grass field named in the snake’s honor and that—” she snaps back into focus and points at the tall grass I am whacking at “—that!—is habu grass!”
“It’s okay, Bosk. I wasn’t going to go in.”
“They’re very aggressive. They’re a very aggressive snake.” Tears pool in her eyes. She marches off down the path before they can fall. I catch up with her and she runs away, disappearing as the path turns farther into the dense habu grass. Like
clockwork, fat gray clouds bully their way in from the east.
“Bosk?” The only answer is the beat of distant helicopter rotors and a relentless roar from the Flight Line. A gathering wind whips the tall habu grass. The long blades tilt their silver backs to the darkening sun. No preliminary scattering of drops announces the rain. It falls in a torrent as drenching as standing beneath the rain spout. “Bosco!”
The tall grass gives way to open land, gentle hills covered in mossy green. At the top of a rise, Bosco stands next to an ornate concrete structure that resembles a miniature bunker embedded in the hill. The bulging top of the structure is nearly as tall as my sister. Rain streams down her face.
I put my arm around her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How?” She is bereft. “Okinawa is going to sink. Do you realize that we are literally floating over the deepest part of the Pacific? Twenty-nine thousand feet. Do you know that Mount Everest could be underneath the island and it wouldn’t even touch us?”
“Okinawa is not going to sink. I told you, Jeane Dixon is a crackpot.”
Tears blend in with the rain coursing down her face. “Underwater is worse than on land, too! There are sea snakes and stonefish. Sea snakes have the deadliest venom of all. And stonefish. They look just like stones. And you could be wading and step on one and they inject you with a potentially deadly but always extremely painful poison. And there’s nothing you can do to avoid them. They look like stones! How are personnel supposed to avoid all stones? … How, Bernie?”
“Bosco, Mama’s going to be all right. She’s just tired.”
Bosco gulps several deep breaths before she can calm herself. “But she never gets out of bed. I thought she’d get up when you got here. Kit is going to get us RIF’d. Her best friend, Sandra Muller, they RIF’d her. She was taking drugs. She went up to the north end of the island with some GIs. I heard Kelly Kulchak’s mom talking about it. OSI came and her whole family was gone overnight. Her hamster, Snerd, was in a cage in the carport and they just left him. He was mummified when the next family moved in and found him. And there are stealie boys. They took my troll house. I left it in the carport, and”—Bosco is overtaken by grief and sobs openly—“it was gone and it had my favorite troll still in it and she was my favorite even if I hadn’t played with her for a while. I was going to.”