by Sarah Bird
“She? You mean me?”
“Yes, of course, you. You were Hana Rose to me only long enough for Hana Rose to let me know that my sorrow was of no use to her.”
I see again that first moment when Fumiko slid back the door of the house in Fussa. I recall her touching my despised vampire hairline. I recall who brought us to the little house.
“The officer was Major Wingo.”
Fumiko nods. She stands, then helps me to my feet. I am stiff and one leg is numb. I find a bathroom and Fumiko runs to the kitchen. She returns to the private room with a tray holding a teapot, cups, and a dish of tabby-cat-orange rice crackers striped with black seaweed. We drink tea and eat the crackers. The band of sunshine on the wall narrows, then almost disappears before I ask again about the long silence between my parents.
“Do you remember the last mission?” Fumiko asks.
Our father’s last mission at Yokota. We had been living in Japan for almost four years. The last mission started for me on a hot day in the summer that I was ten. The day Moe lost her fight to stay in our paper house on the alley in Fussa.
“Mace, I am not plopping myself and my family right in the middle of Queen Bee’s hive.”
“For Christ’s sake. Ignore the woman.”
“Ignore LaRue? There’s no ignoring LaRue. You either kiss her ass or stay the hell out of her way. She’s already got it in for me.”
“Attention, Mohoric. LaRue Wingo is a wife. You are a wife. You are auxiliary units. Her function is to support the mission. Your function is to support the mission.”
“Mace, don’t make me paint you a picture. Not in front of …” I felt my father’s attention settle on me.
“The Root family is transferring quarters to Yokota Air Base. End of discussion.”
“She’ll crucify us, Mace, and you know why.”
The air, hot and muggy, turned weightless and crackled with a dizzying menace. When my father spoke again, his voice had the low, unanswerable gravity of a doctor giving very bad news. “I want my family on-base in case anything happens.”
“What, Mace? What is going to happen?”
“What is going to happen, Mohoric, is that the Root residence is moving to Yokota Air Base.”
And it did. After four years of living in a house with paper walls where a whisper in the kitchen could be heard in the back bedroom, we moved into a house with cinder-block walls that stopped light and sound so thoroughly I missed my family when they were one room away.
The day after Kit got the stitches taken out of her lip where the monkey had bitten her, our father announced that he was going TDY. It didn’t even occur to us to ask where or for how long he was going to be gone.
The last mission started the way they all did, with Moe pulling the battered B-4 bag down from the top shelf of the closet and throwing it onto the white chenille bedspread. She made a puffy comforter of folded undershirts and shorts on the bottom layer. Next was an extra flight suit, then a khaki uniform starched until the pants could be held straight and made to wobble like the blade of a saw. On the very top, Moe placed a Dopp kit with its travel-size bottle of amber Listerine, the Gillette Blue Blade, the rust-stained stalactite tip of a styptic stick.
At the Flight Line, our father promised me he would throw a bucket on a rope out the window when they flew through the right kind of clouds and bring me home more marshmallow creme than I could ever eat.
“Hey, you jabonies!” Major Wingo, already heading into the deep shadow of a hangar, called out. “Any of you plan on flying a bird today? Well, let’s go then. Let’s bite ’em in the ass!”
All the fathers left the individual clots of their families then and hustled across the runway, a gray quilt pieced together from giant squares of concrete. The instant the men came together, they ceased to be fathers, husbands. They melded into a crew, taunting each other, boyish and high-spirited. We watched them disappear into the hangar. For a second, the abandoned families were quiet, uncertain, like hangers-on outside the gates of a party we hadn’t been invited to.
LaRue Wingo’s heavy gold bracelets clanked together in the silence as she brought her cigarette to her lips. LaRue’s hair was wrapped in a tiger-print chiffon scarf that bubbled around her head and tied at the neck. Smoke coming out of her nose like from a cartoon bull’s nostrils, she announced, “I don’t know about any of you shitbirds, but mama-san here’s gonna get herself a big stiff one. And for once I mean a drink.” Most of the wives perked up and crowded around LaRue, anxious for a party they were invited to.
“Moe, you coming?” LaRue yelled.
Moe held her hands out to us. “I’ve got the kids, LaRue.”
“That’s why God gave us maids.”
“Yeah, well …”
“Doesn’t your maid baby-sit, Moe? Maybe you should fire her.”
It was interesting to me that, at that moment, my twin brothers were able to continue amusing themselves by pretending to wipe the contents of their noses on each other even though it was breathtakingly clear to both Kit and me that Mrs. Wingo had said something so terrible that it made all the other wives glance once at each other then stare at the runway. Something so terrible that welts appeared on Moe’s face as if LaRue had lashed her. Kit and I watched Moe’s lips twitch like she was going to say something; then, abruptly, she herded us away.
The car was as hot as a pizza oven on the drive home, and no one spoke.
None of us—not the wives, not the children—were allowed to voice our fears. We never mentioned the other crews, the ones who hadn’t come home, wives and children gone overnight from our lives with no comment. The expression of even the slightest suspicion could bring a visit from OSI. The words “Soviet” and “atomic bomb,” “spy” and “shoot down,” were never breathed, never consciously thought by most families, and lacking words the dread found other ways to express itself.
Over the next two weeks, toddlers long out of diapers began wetting their pants. The doctors at the Base Dispensary saw an epidemic of children with stomachaches, headaches, and rashes they could find no cause for and sent mothers home embarrassed about wasting their time with such imaginary complaints.
At the Richard Bong Theater, the older, bolder children of the absent crews took to slouching in their seats instead of standing at attention when the National Anthem played. Teenage boys stole fire extinguishers and left behind smoking piles of foam. They refused to mow lawns, opened fire hydrants, and shoplifted Coleman pocketknives at the BX. The girls pocketed Max Factor lipsticks and wore them when they made out with GIs.
Nor were the wives immune. They bought ninety-six-piece sets of Noritake china and smoky topaz cocktail rings, geisha dolls in tall glass cases, and beaten brass coffee tables they didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
And they drank.
On a particularly long afternoon at the club, LaRue convinced the other wives that they needed to stage a gala complete with skits and talent acts to both welcome “the guys” home and celebrate the squadron’s tenth anniversary. From that moment on, the wives spent most of their waking hours at the O Club, decorating, rehearsing, and drinking. Only Moe refused to follow the prevailing practice: leave her children with the maid, spend all day at the club, and return home very late, very drunk. Consequently, most of the motherless children gravitated to our house and for those weeks a tribe of kids swirled around and through our house. For the most part the interlopers were Kit’s friends. Now that the stitches had been removed from the monkey bite and her upper lip was pink and plump, the gang of girls who trailed after Kit banging the screen door constantly and consuming vats of the red Kool-Aid and bologna sandwiches Moe and Fumiko made seemed to adore her even more than before.
It was on just such a day, the new house filled with Kit’s herd of friends, that I decided to reopen the perfume factory. We’d left all the fragrances in our lives—honeysuckle, caramelized sugar, noodles, dried fish—behind in Fussa and I missed them. Even the smells of the honey bucket
men had come to seem cozy, homey to me. After our first couple of years in Japan, I’d abandoned my work with honeysuckle and turned to the more reliable comfort of books. Moving to the new house on-base with its infestation of outsiders, however, combined with the general TDY jitteriness that twitched through the air like static electricity waiting to spark anyone it touched, had me searching through the bathroom cabinets for old nose-drop and St. Joseph’s aspirin bottles.
Out in the yard beside the house, Moe and Fumiko, both in the faded dungarees and old, stained blouses they wore to do housework in, pried screens off windows. Fumiko pressed her thumb over the end of the hose and sprayed a jet of water on the screen that Moe held and scrubbed at with a brush. The smell of the dust rising off the old screens was the odor I would forever associate with that house.
Moe didn’t ask what I was doing or order me to “Heave to, sailor, and give us a hand” as I set about collecting what few blossoms there were in the yard. When I mashed what I’d gathered, though, I discovered that the hydrangeas and bougainvillea that surrounded the house were as scentless as paper and I missed our old house even more. I was batting yellow jackets away from a clump of clover I wanted to experiment with when all three of us looked up at the sound of a powerful American car engine rumbling through the still, hot afternoon. We glanced at one another the instant we saw that it was the big Pontiac that LaRue Wingo had been driving ever since her husband had acquired “the ’Vette.”
“Run for the backyard!” I yelled as they came to a stop in front of our house.
Moe gauged the distance from our exposed spot to the safety of the backyard. “Too late. They spotted us already.”
LaRue was the first out of the car. She wore capri pants, a red-striped boat-neck top, black espadrilles that laced around the ankles, and a picture-frame hat. Two other wives emerged from the Pontiac: Madge Coulter, the navigator’s wife, a broad-hipped bottle blonde with Mamie Eisenhower bangs who always had lipstick on her front teeth, and Denise Dugan, the radar observer’s wife, who with her pop eyes and skinny frame seemed to have a thyroid problem. They both had on high heels and crisp shirtwaist dresses, the skirts belled out with petticoats. Obviously, they’d come straight from the O Club, where such dress was required.
As the three pristine women approached, their heels sinking into the grass, Moe glanced down at her blouse, wet and streaked with dust turned to mud, rolled her eyes at Fumiko, and pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her hand. Fumiko turned the hose off.
In a frosty tone, Mrs. Wingo announced, “I’ve come in my official capacity as squadron commander’s wife.”
Moe froze at the word “official” and the scrub brush dropped, unnoticed, from her hand. “Oh God, Mace …”
“No, it’s not that,” LaRue Wingo said, her voice softening a little, though not much. “The guys are coming home. Tomorrow. Zero six hundred hours. They came to the club to give us the news since that’s where all the wives are—except you. You know, we’re all down there getting things ready for the blowout homecoming for the guys.” Mrs. Wingo laughed a fake laugh.
Moe smiled stiffly and waved at the children thundering around. “Well, the kids, you know …”
“That’s what maids are for.”
Moe opened her mouth to answer, stopped herself, and, her voice tight, said, “Thank you for coming by.” Then she turned her back on the squadron commander’s wife and walked away.
LaRue’s mouth seamed into a tight line. She was clearly not accustomed to anyone, ever, turning their back on her. She left her honor guard and moved in so close to Moe that I could smell the sickly sweet carnation smell of her Bellodgia perfume, mixed with smoke and hair spray. Fumiko stared fixedly at the ground as LaRue harshly whispered, “Listen here, Mrs. Root, I have had to eat a lot of crap to get where I am and you are not going to make me swallow this load.” At “this load,” LaRue whisked her hand toward Fumiko.
“Mrs. Wingo,” Moe answered, “your personal problems are none of my business.”
“That is where you are wrong, Mrs. Root. The problems of the wife of your husband’s commanding officer are very much your problems unless—”
“Unless what?”
LaRue sagged and a little of the harshness seeped out of her voice. “Don’t, Moe. You know as well as I do that the only thing that really matters to Mace is flying, and the only way he’s going to stay up there is if my husband and my father say he can.”
Moe turned until she stared directly into Mrs. Wingo’s face; then she cocked her head to the side and said in a voice spiked with a fake peppiness, “Gosh, LaRue, when did they pin the stars on your shoulder? I must have missed that.”
Moe bent over and turned the hose back on.
Mrs. Wingo’s jaw muscles bunched up as she glanced over at the other two wives, waiting between her and the car, and stepped closer to Moe. “Moe, don’t break the chain of command.”
“LaRue, I wasn’t the one who enlisted.”
LaRue snorted a sound somewhere between a laugh and a dying gasp. “Don’t kid yourself. You signed up the day you let him put a ring on your finger. We all did.” LaRue tensed again and jerked her head toward Fumiko. “Get rid of her, Moe. This is your last warning. Either you do it or I will, and you won’t like my way.”
“You’re standing on my hose, LaRue. I’ve got work to do.”
“You are an idiot, Mrs. Root.” Mrs. Wingo headed toward the car.
“Takes one to know one!” Moe yelled the schoolyard taunt after her, then laughed a giddy laugh the way she did when she was drunk. She held her thumb against the flow of the water and aimed the hose up so that a heavy rain sprinkled back down on her, on me, on Fumiko. Mrs. Wingo hurried to the car and, shooting gravel everywhere when she peeled out of the driveway, roared away.
Water fell down in a high arc that pattered giant drops on the gang of children who now swarmed around Moe, shrieking with delight. Though Moe sang in a loud, happy voice, “Daddy’s coming home! Daddy’s coming home!” while she sprinkled everyone, her hand was clenched so tightly around the hose that it trembled and her fingers turned white. That and the scared look on Fumiko’s face made me very uneasy. They should have been happy that the squadron was coming home, but they both were acting as if something even worse was going to happen. Before we went in the house, Moe pulled me aside. “Don’t tell your father I said that.”
“Said what?”
“You know …” She put on a bratty kid’s voice. “ ‘Takes one to know one.’ ” At that, Fumiko broke into one of her all-out, whinnying laughs. Moe’s lips twitched as she fought to keep her own laughter back, then exploded in gusty blasts that went on until I told them both to stop, people were watching and they were embarrassing me.
That night we all had baths. “You don’t want your father to come home and think you’ve all taken up goat ranching, do you?” Moe asked. Steam filled the bathroom. Water slopped over the edge of the tub and ran down the drain at the center of the tile floor and we all, even Fumiko, sang with Moe.
“I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande.” “I was born about ten thousand years ago.” “Or would you rather be a mule?” “Bluebirds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why, can’t I?”
It was the last time Kit and I took a bath in the same tub. I don’t remember many times when Kit and I were happy at the same time about the same thing, but that evening, knowing our father would be home the next day, bringing a bucket of marsh-mallow creme with him, we sang all of Moe’s songs together.
Chlorine
We were at the Flight Line the next morning before the sun was up. Fumiko stayed back at the cinder-block house with the baby. Most of the wives were hungover. They held their hands over their ears when a cargo plane took off, filling the air with the smell of jet fuel, its afterburners lighting the darkness before dawn with orange flames. As the ground rumbled from the strain of the big plane leaving the earth, all the wives took grateful swigs of the “hair of the dog” Blo
ody Marys that Mrs. Wingo passed around, laughing, delighting in using the same phrases the guys did. All except Moe, who was not hungover but was one month pregnant with the first of three babies she would miscarry before Bob was born.
The clotted look of the pulpy drink that the pop-eyed Mrs. Dugan shoved in her face, combined with the smell of jet fuel, caused Moe’s stomach to shimmy. She waved the Bloody Mary away.
The cargo plane took off into orange streaks of gathering dawn, and in the silence that followed, LaRue announced, “Moe’s not gonna drink with us.” Suddenly each wife’s memory conveniently reorganized itself around this slight to the wife of their husband’s commander, the wife of the man who filled out their husband’s Officers’ Efficiency Reports, the document that would decide whether she and her family would be stationed at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu or living with her in-laws in Bogalusa, Mississippi, while her husband completed an unaccompanied tour in Greenland. This perspective helped the wives recall Moe’s absence from the club over the past three weeks. How they had managed to get over there and decorate the club, make the banners, design the centerpieces, rehearse the entertainment, decide the order of the acts, while Moe had chosen to just stay home. And now this? Refusing to drink with the commander’s wife?
“Hey, you’ll all survive.”
Moe’s answer was a joke, a testament to how lightly she regarded herself. But the wives looked to LaRue, who bugged her eyes in a caricature of innocent, injured astonishment behind Moe’s back, and conveniently chose to interpret the joke as an insult. That Moe, blithe and unconcerned, didn’t care what the wives thought of her was the worst—the source, in fact, of all her sins.