by Sarah Bird
The elevator creaks and groans on the way up. Kit works at the smoked-glass mirror. She tugs her lower eyelid down to line it in black, quickly rats up the top of her hair, then pulls out three lipsticks.
“You’re putting on three different colors?”
“Of course. You’ve got to start off with your matte base coat.” She applies a peach tone, then blots it off. “Hit eleven,” she instructs when the doors open at the fourth floor. As we shudder upward, she continues her commentary. “Always add yellow. Makes your teeth look white.” She twirls up a tube of yellow and smears that on top of the peach, turning to smile at me. Her teeth are so white, they look blue. “Then finish off with your pearlizer.” She adds an iridescent topcoat and pushes the button for four.
The elevator stops on the seventh floor on the way back down and a Ryukyuan family—mother, father, two young boys in shorts, and an older girl in a school uniform—gets on with much bowing. Kit continues her toilette, whipping out a mascara wand.
“This is layer five or six for the mascara. Mascara doesn’t get good until at least the fourth layer.” The Ryukyuan family watches as if Kit were putting on a cooking demonstration. She finishes and turns to them with a smile.
They suck air in through their teeth and exclaim, “Ah so, desuka. Utsukushii.”
Kit gasses herself and everyone else with Emeraude. The Okinawan family all smile and bow when we get off at the fourth floor.
We follow a clump of American girls to a windowless, low-ceilinged banquet room packed with the dependent daughters of every branch of the armed services. It is obvious that no one has any clearer idea of what this dance contest constitutes than I do. A girl in a sequined drum-majorette costume warms up with a baton. Another one beats out a snappy rhythm with her patentleather tap shoes. Yet another girl is draped in the billowing chiffon of a ballroom dancer. Most of them, though, are just ordinary girls who smell like coconut hair conditioner and look as if they stepped out of the Sears Junior Miss section three or four years ago.
Kit enters and slips behind a decorative screen where she surveys the crowd, appraising the frosted lips and blushered cheeks of the other contestants with the wary eye of a Secret Service agent. The banquet room crackles with the murderous competitive urges of several dozen girls all pretending they’re not competing.
“Who’s supposed to be in charge here?” a petite redhead with too much foundation covering her freckles asks.
“Yeah, they said two o’clock. It’s almost three-thirty.”
A swell of peevish murmurs ripples through the room that stops dead when a smiling Ryukyuan woman, a hotel employee in a crisp white Dacron blouse and navy blue skirt, hurries in on quick little bird steps, accompanied by a barrel on legs that I assume is Far East Funnyman Bobby Moses. In a chrome-colored sharkskin suit, Bobby looks like one of the Rat Pack guys, Joey Bishop maybe, if Joey had been soaking in a vat of pickle juice for the past decade, wrinkling and swelling up to an enormous size. Bobby must weigh three hundred pounds, not counting the pinkie rings. His face is pasty beneath the telltale orange stain of a QT tan. His thin hair glistens with Brylcreem and has the uniform flat black that comes with one too many applications of Grecian Formula. Bobby mounts a low dais and the Ryukyuan woman rushes to pull up a chair. He surveys the crowd with the seigneurial eye of a Las Vegas Mafia don, beckons the woman to him, whispers in her ear. She nods several times and hurries to the edge of the dais.
“Today, no dance. Onaree give name.” She forms the girls into a line and has them pass in front of Bobby Moses. The first girl carries a baton and looks about eleven. Without a word, Bobby motions her to move on. Next up is a heavy-legged girl with bleached hair and too much mascara. Bobby holds out a card that indicates she’s made the preliminary cut. She takes it and skips happily out of the room.
The line has dwindled to less than half a dozen by the time Kit emerges from behind the screen, but her entrance has a dramatic effect.
The girl nearest me spots her and groans to her mother, “Oh, shit, Kit Root. Why did we even bother coming?”
Kit wears the look that our father calls “owning the place” as she saunters toward the dais. Knowing they are defeated before they even try, the remaining girls file meekly, swiftly, past Bobby Moses, who doesn’t so much as glance at any of them before they scurry off like peasants making way for the queen.
I trail behind Kit as she steps onto the dais. A cloud of Brut cologne, Sen-Sen breath mints, Dial soap, and Right Guard deodorant envelops Bobby Moses. He seems to have the obsessive concern with hygiene of many fat men. His small nails have been buffed and coated in a clear polish. He hands Kit one of the cards that are passes to the official try-outs. Kit gifts him with a dazzling smile, but Bobby waves her on without changing his expression.
“What about her?” he asks as I pass by. Bobby Moses’s voice doesn’t sound as if it could have come out of his ponderous body. It is a speedy New York voice, punchy and quick.
“Her?” Kit asks, amused. “That’s my sister. She’s not entering.”
“Why not?” Bobby asks. “You crippled, sis? You don’t look crippled. Here, take a card.”
“But she doesn’t want to try out,” Kit explains.
“You dance?”
I nod.
“You dance but don’t speak, huh?”
“No, I do both.”
“She dances and she speaks. This we don’t know about the other ones. Here.” Bobby holds a card out to me but hangs on to it when I try to take it and nods at my jeans and dashiki. “You’re not going to wear the Mau-Mau threads when you try out?”
“No.”
He turns the card loose. “Good. Time and address are on there. Try to look like a member of the female species.” He makes his thumb and forefinger into a little gun, shoots me—“Kyew”—then heaves himself to his feet and sails out of the Kokusai banquet room.
“You’re not actually going to try out, are you?” Kit’s question is equal parts threat and statement of obvious assumption.
“What does it matter? It’s not like our father would ever in a million years let either one of us go to Tokyo with Mr. Pinkie Ring there.”
“I can handle Daddy.”
“There is no way, Kit. Not even you are going to get him to agree to this.”
Popcorn
At first, the concussion is absorbed into the dream I am having of being back aboard the S.S. President Wilson with the great boiler clanging next to my head and the ocean heaving below.
Then Bosco’s hot breath on my face wakes me fully. “We’re sinking!” She clutches my nightie, pulls me out of bed. “Jeane Dixon was right! The island is sinking!”
Kit stands at our high window. Her face is orange. It reflects a pillar of flame that ascends so high into the black night that the full moon is lost in the blaze. I remember the sign protesting nuclear bombs and imagine Kit’s hair blown straight back, her bones glowing like a cartoon skeleton’s. In the boys’ room, Bob sobs.
The twins come in, Abner holding Bob. We all stand, silent, at the window. Down the hall, our parents’ voices rise. The front door opens and a scream of sirens penetrates the concrete house. The door shuts and the thick concrete walls again muffle all sound. Moe comes into our room.
“Where’s Daddy going?”
Moe lifts Bosco up without answering. My little sister’s face is glazed with tears and snot, and she’s gasping in hiccupy breaths.
“Is the island sinking? Are we all going to die?”
“No one in my family is going to die.”
Moe sounds as sure as if she is explaining gravity, and for that moment I stop wondering about nuclear weapons. In the next instant, however, my mind fills and refills with the luxurious image of a mushroom cloud billowing out at the base of the column of fire, ballooning toward us with an opulent languor that will liquefy even our house of concrete. It seems inevitable. It seems like the obvious ending to the story that started when Moe struck the match that lit
her first cigarette in Tunis.
“It’s a plane. A plane blew up on takeoff, that’s all. The men in the plane will be rescued. The fire will be put out.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Kit asks.
“He went down to the Flight Line.”
“Why? Why does a Community Liaison Officer need to show up for something like this?”
“Everyone pitches in during an emergency,” Moe answers.
“In other words you have no idea,” Kit snipes. “As usual, you don’t know anything.”
“Eileen Root, that will be all. If you don’t have anything constructive to contribute, you can keep your mouth shut.”
“Was it a B-fifty-two that blew up?” Bosco asks. “Like the B-fifty-twos the protesters at Gate Three want us to get rid of? The ones with nuclear bombs?”
“No one said anything about nuclear bombs.”
“No one says anything about anything on this island. They just do it.”
Moe hears Bosco’s voice teetering toward uncontrolled panic and asks, “Who’s for Sticky?” It is part of my mother’s alchemical omnipotence that she can transform sugar into an antidote to any crisis. Sticky, a Cracker Jack–like combination of popcorn, peanuts, and caramelized sugar, is her big gun.
“Bernie, you and the twins pop the corn. Bob? Bosco? Whaddaya say?”
It scares me that Moe is working so hard at being casual.
The smell of sugar melting, then caramelizing in the black cast-iron skillet calms us all. At just the right moment, Moe tosses in a pinch of baking soda and the clear sugar magma fizzes until it has foamed into an opaque syrup that she quickly drizzles over the popcorn Abner, Buzz, and I have waiting in a stainless steel bowl. Moe tosses in peanuts before the aggregate cools.
We take our treat outside to the patio, where we stand, gazing fixedly at the fire as we chomp Sticky with a mechanized fervor.
“It’s just as big as it was before,” Bob says.
Moe laughs in a way meant to sound gentle and lighthearted. “Oh, no, Bob, it’s lots smaller. They are definitely getting it under control.” Moe stuffs several quick handfuls into her mouth and stares at the fire as she chews. “Definitely.”
“Is Daddy down there?” Bob asks.
“No, he’s not anywhere near the fire,” Moe answers. “He’s directing the whole operation with a walkie-talkie up in the control tower behind six inches of plate glass.” The twins look at each other, impressed by the calm authority of our mother’s lie.
“He’s down there because of the nuclear bombs we’re not supposed to have here, isn’t he? That’s what ‘Community Liaison’ means, doesn’t it?” Who knows what combination of photographic filing of random comments led to Bosco’s question, but one look at Moe’s face tells us all that our mother believes the same thing.
“Did I ever tell you kids about the time Caroline and I made fudge with Audie Murphy?” Moe asks.
“Who’s Aw Gee Mercy?”
“Twerp.” Buzz cuts Bob off. “Only the biggest hero in all of War Two.”
It gives me the creeps to hear my brother mimic my father’s pilot talk.
“He was in that cool movie, No Name on the Bullet.”
“A movie star?” Kit displays a rare show of interest. “You knew a movie star?”
I can almost accept Bob not knowing this essential part of our mother’s history, but Kit? She must be joking. How could she not know that our mother made fudge with Audie Murphy? Then I realize that all those mornings back in Japan with Fumiko when Moe told us stories about her time as a nurse in North Africa, Kit had been outside playing Elvis or Pharaoh or just leading her herd of adoring girl-horses around.
“Oh, Audie wasn’t a movie star then. This was when the unit was still in Tunisia and the Battle of Sicily was raging.”
A boom that could be a piece of plywood falling or the detonator bomb that will ignite a nuclear explosion sounds in the distance. Moe’s eyes dart to the tower of flame. I imagine her hair swept back by a nuclear blast. I imagine all of us incinerated, transformed in the blink of an eye from Moe, Bernie, Kit, Abner, Buzz, Bosco, and Bob into stair-stepped skeletons.
Moe laughs. Her imitation of insouciant amusement is so convincing I believe for a moment that there is nothing to worry about. “My gosh, I haven’t thought about this in years. We had a lot of Colonial troops on the ward—Senegalese, French Foreign Legionnaires—and I went to check on this one fellow. Senegalese. Black as tar. Big, strong fellow with those fearsome tribal scars slashed along his cheeks.”
Moe’s story has made Bosco forget about nuclear weapons. Bosco still watches the fire, but she is now seeing the scar-whelped face of Moe’s patient in Tunisia.
“Moamar, I believe his name was. I went in there with a bedpan because the poor guy had both his legs in traction and what do I find?” Moe trills a laugh. “Damned if old Moamar hasn’t cut himself loose. All that traction that it had taken me hours to rig up was just hanging around him like yesterday’s wash. ‘Hey, Moamar,’ I said to him. ‘What gives?’
“Oh, what a sweet smile that man had. Maybe it was just his skin being so black made his teeth look so white, but the instant he smiled, I couldn’t be mad at him. So he rattled away at me in French. Guess he thought that since I was white, I must savvy the lingo, but all I caught was ‘Pee-pee, pee-pee!’ ”
Bob, helpless before any mention of bodily functions, chuckles maniacally.
“Moamar had cut himself loose so he could go outside and sprinkle the daisies! Never did find out how he managed that one, with compound fractures in both legs, but people who could sit through sandstorms like the ones we had that left an inch of grit inside your jar of cold cream with nothing but the burnoose on their backs to protect them—well, those are some tough customers.”
“The movie star,” Kit urges. “Get to the movie star.”
“Right, right. Audie. Anyway, by the time I got back to the charge desk after stringing Moamar back up, I was bushed. I plopped myself down and was just finishing up the charts when this little face pokes around the corner. I swear, my first thought was, Who the heck let a Boy Scout onto the ward? Because that’s what Audie looked like.” Moe looks at her sons, at their Boy Scout faces, and her voice falters, the flirtatious perkiness leaks out, and she sounds tired again. “This big war hero just looked like a boy.” She stares at her boys long enough for Buzz, Abner, and Bob to become self-conscious. “A little boy.”
“Hey, look, it’s going down!” Buzz points at the blaze.
“No, it’s not, twerp. It just looks that way ’cause the sun’s coming up.”
“Can’t you boys ever call each other anything but twerp or twink or dipshit?”
“Mmmm … queerbait?”
Clouds of black smoke envelop the bright flame. Abner reconsiders. “Look, it is going out.”
“Or is it just that you’re”—Buzz yanks Abner’s running shorts down to his knees—“not paying attention!” Abner whirls around and traps his twin in a hammerhold. Buzz breaks free and lets rip with a samurai shriek. Abner answers by squatting into a sumo crouch. They lunge, each grabbing hold of the other’s running shorts, locked like battling rams, cartwheeling down the long hill. Bob runs alongside them, jumping and hooting loud as a howler monkey.
“Boys! Come on now! Someone’s going to get hurt!” Since Moe is laughing so hard that tears are running down her face, the twins grunt and shriek all the louder. Bosco studies Moe’s face nervously, trying to decide whether to believe in the tears or the laughter.
Before Bosco can get fully frantic, Buzz yanks down her pajama bottoms. Both twins run down the long grassy hill, waving their hands above their heads, shrieking in a terrified falsetto, as Bosco and Bob run after them.
“What retards,” Kit says, but even she is smiling. We watch the four youngest members of our family careen about like demented lunatics until the sun comes up enough for the other officers’ families to see us, then we all go inside.
Tide
I wander out to the living room. Moe yanks a damp khaki uniform out of the bag she’s taken from the refrigerator. She shakes a little extra water on it from a Coke bottle with a sprinkler top, then batters the fabric with the hot iron. A cloud of steam rises that smells of Tide detergent, warm cotton, and the sulfuric pinch of my mother’s anger.
“You’re gonna ruin it.” Only when she speaks do I notice Kit lounging on the sofa in her shortie pajamas eating a Pop-Tart.
“Then you get your little butt over here and do it yourself.” Moe holds up the steaming iron.
“You know I can’t iron.”
“Well, it’s high time you learned.”
Kit rolls her eyes. The hiss of the iron as Moe bangs it onto the uniform punctuates her fury.
“He’s leaving?” I ask. I can hear the sound of the shower running.
“Apparently.” Moe mists the pants with a long spray from the starch can.
“Where’s he going?”
“You know just as much as I do.” Moe irons in silence for a few minutes. The shower stops running. “Here.” She holds the iron out to me. “I know you have mastered the mysterious art of ironing.” Moe glares at Kit. Kit shakes her head at the painful predictability of it all. Moe looks at me, Kit looks away, and the history of our alliances is chronicled in three glances. Moe leaves.
A warm cloud of steam hisses into my face. The water in the iron burbles and sloshes.
From the bedroom comes the rare sound of our parents speaking directly to each other.
Kit snaps her fingers at me and orders, “Stop doing that.” She sits upright on the couch, listening intently.
I rest the iron on the board until the hissing burbles stop and I can hear Moe ask my father where he is going. He answers in a testy voice, “As I said before, T, period—got that? Am I going too fast for you?”