The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  As the sun rose and Fuji-san flushed pink in the dawn, I felt the tense geometry between Moe and LaRue. I wished my mother would make a joke, a good one, or say something to remind the other wives that their children had swarmed over our house for most of the last three weeks—anything to break LaRue’s spell. And she might have, except that a line mechanic in a greasy jumpsuit stepped up to our group and asked, “Hey, are y’all waiting for the Thirty-eighty-first?”

  Madge, emboldened by the drinks, the newfound wives’ solidarity, the weeks of no husbands, and her new closeness with the commander’s wife, snapped back, “You can bet your sweet ass we are.”

  The mechanic stopped, the fuel line he carried drooping beside him. He squashed his cap around to scratch his head, and deep furrows of puzzlement creased his narrow forehead. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  The group of wives froze into a glacier, movement and life stilled.

  After a very long moment, LaRue asked, “What do you mean?”

  The mechanic recognized LaRue’s tone of command and stiffened, looking around nervously, wishing he had said nothing. “Well, you know … I just figured someone’d told y’all something. You know, ’cause—”

  “That will be all, Private!” The order issued from behind the wives. They turned to find a colonel, full bird, whom none of them recognized, flanked by a couple of APs in white helmets, white belts, and gloves. The colonel nodded and the APs stepped forward, grabbed the mechanic, and led him away. Three letters were embossed in gold on the briefcase the colonel carried: OSI.

  “What’s going on?” LaRue demanded, the Bloody Marys having blurred her usually acute radar for the bounds of her own power. Demanding was a mistake with a colonel from the Office of Special Investigations.

  “That is classified information.”

  “Where are our husbands?” Captain Coulter’s young wife pleaded, a note of hysteria spiking her question.

  “That is classified information.”

  “They are supposed to be here. We got official word.”

  Again, the colonel answered, “That information is classified.” The Apes flanked the colonel as he issued his order: “Go home. You will be notified of any further developments.”

  There was a stunned moment in which all the wives knew that the thing they were never allowed to name had come to pass. The children caught their mothers’ unspoken dread like a virus and burst into tears. The twins wailed. Moe, her face blank, pulled us away.

  On the drive home, I scrutinized Moe’s every breath, every blink. The sick putty color of her face and the way she was panting through her mouth worried me, but I didn’t start to panic until we came to a stop and she didn’t throw her arm out to protect Abner and Buzz, who sat next to her in the front seat.

  “When is Daddy coming home?” Kit asked. “He was supposed to be there. Lisa’s mom said they were coming home today. Why wasn’t he there? Why didn’t—”

  “Shut up, Eileen. Just shut up.” Moe’s order, issued in a dazed monotone as if she were trying to add a very big number in her head, stunned us all into silence.

  Fumiko met us at the driveway. As Moe got out of the car, Fumiko went to her, took both her hands, and guided her into the house as if she were a very old person. I knew when Fumiko told Moe that everything would be fine that our father was dead. Everything was never fine. I went into my new bedroom, the girls’ room, and closed the door.

  Fumiko came in a moment later and sat on the bed next to me. I looked over and saw that she was holding my hand, but I couldn’t feel hers. I lost track of the world around me. Each time my heart beat, everything in front of my eyes sprang up on the spot, startling me as if it had just been created that very instant. The Dolls of the World, my insect-collecting kit, the pennant on the wall from our class trip to Tokyo Tower, my collection of pink All About books. I had never seen any of it before.

  “Breathe!” Fumiko ordered, but until she whacked me on the back I couldn’t recall what the word meant.

  I gasped, then inhaled and exhaled a sob.

  “He’s not dead.” Fumiko repeated herself three times before I could stop crying enough to hear the words. “Captain Root is alive. All the fathers are alive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Don’t just say something to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not. They’re alive.”

  “How do you know?”

  Outside, a misty spray of rain glazes the leaves. How do you know?

  How did she know?

  In the hideaway behind the officers’ club, Fumiko pours the last of the tea. It is cold and bitter. Moths batter themselves against the paper globes around the light. I realize then what Fumiko saw that day eight years ago that made her answer my question. She saw what she’d seen from the first moment she slid back the door of our little house in Fussa. She’d seen Hana Rose, but she’d also seen herself. In me she’d glimpsed a little girl like herself, a child fundamentally displaced. At that moment back in my bedroom on Yokota when I asked Fumiko how she knew my father would return, she saw the child in the cave whose father was never coming home. Only this time she had the power to stop the anguish.

  “You can never tell anyone,” Fumiko had told me. “You have to swear.”

  I stopped crying and sat up on my bed, alert. The secrets you weren’t allowed to tell were always true. “I will.”

  “No one.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “They are in Alaska. If they had been shot down, your country would be at war with Russia. They will be home soon.”

  “But how do you know?”

  Fumiko makes me swear one more time that I will never tell anyone.

  “Major Wingo told me.”

  Then I believed. The squadron commander had told her. Of all the children, only I knew that the fathers were safe. Our lives were built on the knowledge that secrets were powerful, and now I had one. A very big one.

  “Remember,” Fumiko cautioned me. “You can’t tell anyone. If you do, I will get in very bad trouble.”

  “Not even Moe?”

  “Especially not Moe. She is too kindhearted. She will tell the others.”

  That afternoon, Moe announced that she couldn’t stand to be trapped in “this tomb of a base house” one second longer and all of us except Fumiko went to the officers’ club pool. Fumiko stayed at the new house. Moe wore sunglasses and a big hat and sat still as a statue in the wading pool with the twins and Bosco, who were too young to understand that something was very wrong. The other wives all gathered around LaRue at the Terrace Café and drank and cried. I usually ate French fries under an umbrella and read, but not that day. That day when Moe left the ladies’ dressing room balancing Bosco on one hip, the twins following her like ducklings, I stayed behind in the cool damp darkness of the dressing room where Kit and her friends had gathered.

  Usually, in public, I followed Kit’s lead and we pretended that we didn’t know each other, but that day I had a secret. I wasn’t going to tell anyone, I’d promised Fumiko I wouldn’t, but I had it. I had a secret. Warmed by my nugget of power, I dared to brave the chilly reception I would receive from Kit and her friends clustered at the back of the dressing room.

  Kit’s platinum-blond head was, as usual, at the center of the girls. Kit and Lisa Wingo sat on a metal bench in front of a row of lockers hugging each other and crying. Debbie Coulter and her little sister, Ellen, had tears rolling down their faces, as did Captain Dugan’s daughter, Sheryl.

  I stood beside them for several minutes before Kit and her friends looked up. When they did, they stared at me, puzzled by how I could have found my way to the planet of the cute and popular girls. Too late I realized it wasn’t enough to simply possess the nugget, I would have to display it. I decided I would flash it, just give the girls a glimpse, certainly not enough to betray Fumiko.

  “You don’t have to be sad.” My voice came out a thi
n little mouse squeak. The girls looked at one another, checking to see if any one of them could interpret the strange sounds they’d just heard.

  “You don’t have to be sad,” I repeated.

  All the girls turned and gave me their full attention.

  “Not be sad?” Lisa Wingo sneered. “Uh, dodo, in case you hadn’t noticed, our fathers didn’t come home today.”

  “But they will.”

  It was what the girls wanted to hear more than anything, and, in spite of themselves, they leaned in incrementally closer to me.

  “That’s not what the OSI guy said.” Sheryl Dugan popped her eyes at me in a way that suggested she might have inherited her mother’s thyroid problem.

  “But he didn’t say they weren’t.”

  The circle enfolded me a bit more tightly.

  Kit, who had been eyeing me skeptically, delivered her ruling. “Don’t listen to her. She lies like a dog.”

  Without moving an inch, the girls receded.

  My breath clotted in my chest and all I could hear was the blood roaring in my ears as if Kit were holding me underwater.

  “I do not!” I gasped, bursting back to the surface of their attention. “It’s true. Our fathers are alive! If they were dead, we’d be at war with Russia!”

  The girls then surged around me, desperate for details. In the space of one second, I became the one they all liked. The one they wanted to be with. I was newborn. I opened my eyes for the first time and found myself surrounded by litter mates, sisters, friends. I filled my lungs with the oxygen of their attention and never wanted to exhale.

  “Who told you?” Kit demanded.

  The girls looked from Kit back to me.

  That part I couldn’t reveal. That would have been telling. As long as I didn’t say her name, Fumiko would be safe.

  “Yeah,” Lisa repeated. “Who told you? We don’t believe you unless you say who told.”

  After breathing the oxygen of the girls’ attention, I thought I would die without it.

  “She doesn’t know anything. She never talks to anyone,” Kit informed her playmates without the tiniest hint of malice. “This is stupid. Come on, let’s go have an underwater tea party.” She stepped away, trying to pull her coterie with her.

  To my amazement, none of them moved.

  “Marco Polo? I’ll be it.”

  The girls looked from me to Kit but didn’t move. Kit shrugged her beautiful, heedless shrug that said what would always be true, she’d have fun with them or without them. Kit left; the other girls stayed. I could breathe again.

  “Okay, tell us who told you.” With Kit gone, Lisa Wingo, her second-in-command, became bossier. Her order had her mother’s peremptory tone. It made the words stick in my throat.

  When I hesitated, Sheryl said, “Aw, come on, let’s go find Eileen.”

  The girls moved away and I felt myself turning back into the ghost girl that Kit would tell me I was eight years later. That I was invisible and silent. A nauseated, untethered sensation overtook me then as if I were floating at a great height above the other girls and that I would continue floating higher and higher until I disappeared forever out of sight.

  “Okay, okay.” They were nearly past the last row of lockers. “But if I tell, you have to promise you won’t ever, ever, ever tell anyone. Ever.”

  They each promised, then crossed their hearts and hoped to die. But that wasn’t enough. So they triple-crossed their hearts and hoped to fall into a benjo ditch and get caught by the Apes and their moms and dads would die, and then I believed them.

  I knew they would never tell. I told them where the secret had come from. I told them Fumiko’s name. Debbie and Ellen and Sheryl stopped and looked at Lisa. For one second, Lisa looked like a little girl instead of the squadron commander’s daughter, as odd comments and overheard conversations about her father and Moe Root’s maid clicked through her mind. Then, wiping them away, she declared to the other girls authoritatively, “She’s crazy. Fumiko is their maid. Maids don’t know anything and neither does she.”

  Satisfied with that verdict, the girls left, and it was as if I had never spoken, never bartered away Fumiko’s secret to become visible for that one moment. They didn’t believe me. But, more important, even if they had, they had promised not to tell. So when what happened next happened, I never, not for one second, thought it had anything to do with me.

  White Russian

  “There you are! Call off the bloodhounds. Christ, I was getting ready to drag the river. Shoeshine guy finally told me where you went.” Bobby Moses in full tuxedo, glowing orange from a fresh application of QT, stands at the sliding door. In one hand, he grips my vanity case and the white boots. In the other is my costume. He thrusts all of it at me.

  “Zelda, do you, by any chance, remember that we’ve got a show to put on in, oh …”—Bobby makes an elaborate production of throwing his arm out to expose his Rolex watch and trills out with theatrical surprise—“oh, my, ten minutes.” His voice is a girlish singsong that gives way to repressed fury when Bobby bellows, “Ten fahcacting minutes!”

  Bobby immediately reins himself in, presses his palms together in prayer position, and asks, with the edgy control of a bank robber assuring everyone that no one will get hurt if they just follow orders, “Do you think you could possibly put your costume on and be ready to go on when the spotlight hits that big black space onstage where your ass is supposed to be? Do you? Do you think you could do that for me?”

  Bobby presses his fingers to his lips, pretending alarm.

  “Or—oh, goodness, Zelda—am I breaking up your little kaffeeklatsch here with my cruel demands that you actually work?”

  Fumiko stands. Bobby’s presence scrambles the frequency that Fumiko and I communicate on. With him glaring at us, I cannot hear the meaning behind her words. Only the bar-girl English comes through as she tells me, “You go job-u now, honto. Hayaku. You go, Bobby. I go job-u now. See you tomorrow. Sayonara.” Before I can stop her, Fumiko is gone.

  Bobby squints murderously at me. “This joke is over, kumquat. I do not give a flying fuck anymore if your father is General Dwight frapping Eisenhower. This ain’t the Top Three tonight. This is the Yokota Officers’ Club. We got field-grade out there tonight. Probably a general or two. The whole freaking brass factory.”

  Shaking his hands above his head, questioning a cruel god about why such a cockamamie shiksa should be inflicted upon him, Bobby escorts me back to the club.

  The ladies’ room is exactly as it was the last time I visited it eight years ago during the evening of the squadron’s tenth anniversary celebration, the evening the 3081ST Reconnaissance Squadron came home from my father’s last mission. The same bent-wire vanity chairs with pink velvet cushions sit in front of a long dressing table and mirror. The pink velvet covering them and the walls is faded now to the color of a shell on the beach. It is as if this one room of the Yokota Officers’ Club has been preserved as a little shrine to the final shining moment of the American raj. To a time when America had conquered the world and was magnanimous in victory.

  There is even, tucked away in a dark corner, a framed club calendar from April 1959. My heart leaps to see confirmation of my memory that the Yokota Officers’ Club was once a place of glamour and sophistication. Every square of the month is filled in. There was Black Jack Nite, Lobster Tail Nite, Buck and Doe Nite, Free Manhattan and Martini Nite. There were family brunches, jazz concerts, floor shows, kiddie entertainment. Johnny Watson and his Kampai Kings played every night of the week except Monday. Drinks were fifteen cents on Thursday. There was brandied duck, leg of lamb, broiled salmon. Monday was Stag Nite and Tuesday mornings the Officers’ Wives Club met.

  All that remain now are the smells. Aqua Net hair spray. Revlon Aquamarine hand lotion. Max Factor Cherries in the Snow lipstick. The smells of wives preparing themselves to celebrate the return of their husbands. Chanel No. 5, Wind Song, Emeraude, Bellodgia perfume. The last, Bellodgia, with its memory o
f the dense funeral-parlor carnation smell of LaRue Wingo’s signature scent, takes me back to that last night at the Yokota Officers’ Club.

  It was steaming hot that second morning when we went to the Flight Line to pick up our father. We’d gotten word late the night before that the crew was really coming in this time. No false alarms. All the wives except Moe had assembled at LaRue’s house at the news of this reprieve and had stayed up all night drinking Kahlua Stingers and playing canasta to celebrate.

  “There he is,” Moe said, pointing eagerly to one in the group of men in zippered flight suits, fleece-lined jackets thrown over their shoulders, who was breaking away and coming toward us. Our father turned wavy and smeared as he walked through a stream of jet exhaust roiling across the runway. Moe gave me Bosco to hold and ran to her husband. He swept her into his arms, twirling her so that her feet left the earth. They kissed like actors in a movie and I was embarrassed until I looked around and saw that all the fathers were kissing the wives the same way. Then Moe put her head on his chest and he patted her back while she sobbed.

  As usual after a long TDY, we were shy with this man in the olive-green flight suit with all the zippers who had become a stranger. All except for Kit, who thrived on strangers and rushed to greet him. He scooped Kit into his arms and touched the new pink scar on her upper lip.

  As our father approached us, Bosco buried her head in my shoulder while the twins hid in Moe’s full skirt. I waited and watched, searching to see where he could be hiding the bucket of marshmallow creme he’d promised to bring back.

  The ice wasn’t broken until we were in the car and his flight lunch was being distributed. Moe broke the Milky Way into enough pieces for all of us. The twins got the corrugated packets of salt and pepper. Kit claimed the apple. I snagged the packets of mustard and mayonnaise and held them to my flushed cheeks, amazed, as always, by how cold they were. By how cold it must be in the sky.