“Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s your best friend?”
“Best friend? Shinyuā? Mmm . . .”
“Shinyuā?” Yuki had never heard the word before. Her Japanese was like that—things about which her parents did not speak did not exist.
“Shinyuā is like friend. Very close friend.” Her mother slid the fries into a wide-mouthed blue bowl. “Nakamura Machiko. She was so funny. Always had the best stories.” Yuki tried to imagine her mother with a friend. Her mother sharing a secret. Her mother as a person other than just her mother.
“What happened to her?”
“Happened? She is my friend.” Yuki’s mother sliced off a leaf of baked ham, and dropped it onto the ancestors’ plate.
“But you never see her.” Yuki had never seen her mother with any friend. Her father had drinking colleagues. But her mother? No wonder Yuki didn’t know what to say to people. “You’ve never said her name. Not once.” Don’t you get lonely? Is the hug of your pink apron enough?
“Take that to the altar.” Her mother shooed Yuki toward the main room, smiling still.
The ancestors always ate first. Before each meal, a small serving went on the altar and Yuki’s mother would clap three times to call the dead to dinner. “Now we live in America even the ancestors can try new things,” she’d told Yuki. She’d offered up corned beef hash, chicken potpie, sugar cookies, and French fries.
The altar was on the piano. Yuki placed the plate on the white table napkin, next to the incense. Along with the ashes of a silk-soft Russian hamster in a silver cookie tin, there were photographs of relatives whose remains were kept on that other continental plate. Yuki’s mother and father swore she’d met these people, but Yuki couldn’t remember a single touch. The aunt in her tea-green kimono was as foreign as Gauguin’s Tahitian women in the Met. Flowers were stacked on the piano to be sent up to the ancestors: peonies, chrysanthemums, yellow roses, even those peculiar red-leaved Christmas plants. Yuki imagined an ectoplasmic petaled ocean sweeping across the spiritual realm.
Her mother was still clattering in the kitchen; the fries gleamed still unoffered. How were the ancestors protecting them anyway?
She reached out and took one fry, letting the heat sear her lips, daring the dead to do anything at all.
Only then did Yuki clap. One. Two. Three.
On Friday, Odile turned as Yuki climbed through the window. Her eyes were wide, translucent green and framed by a stippling of mascara dust. She asked, “Want some gum?”
The gum was green as the girl’s eyes, Yuki leaned toward it, but in the brightness of the moment forgot to actually say yes. Odile retracted the gum.
“Smart. It makes you feel better now but after, you’re hungrier. Guts are like men that way. A taste makes them slobber. So why are you skipping? I thought Chinese girls were naturally tiny.”
“Japanese.”
“My family’s from Eastern Europe—basically, they’re half potato. If I look at a fry, I gain a pound.”
Yuki ached to pour a pint of milk into a tall glass and then into her stomach.
Odile continued, “And that shit they have downstairs makes me want to puke. Spaghetti and MEATballs. MEAT loaf. They can’t even name the animal it comes from. It’s just MEAT.”
Yuki nodded. Their school was run by an ex-minister. Most kids brought in packed lunches, but there were cheap school lunches for those whose parents were too overworked to cook. It was the poor kids who ate school lunches, but Yuki had learned long ago that it was best not to let her mother pack lunch. She overdid it, sealing potato croquettes, corn on the cob and weenies into tiny Tupperware containers. It was embarrassing; at least in line behind the kids whose moms were dead or working long hours, she could pretend she fit in. Anyway, she enjoyed the sweet tang of the meatballs’ sauce.
Odile leaned over the railing. Pigeons paraded across the sky. The girl was beautiful and Yuki thought that if she’d been born male, she would’ve wrapped her fingers around the girl’s narrow skull and kissed her. As it was, Yuki hoped she had been sent a friend for her last American hours. A spearmint-eyed friend; but there was no gesture she could make with lips or hands to express this wish.
So Yuki said, “My mom wears these stupid house dresses like she thinks it’s still the fifties.” Her mother sewed them herself. She was too petite, and store-bought dresses hit her in the wrong place. She was a war child who had stopped growing the same day her family’s home shivered into flame. Yuki was only 5 foot 3 inches and still half a foot taller than her mother.
“I know what you mean. My mom has three dresses all in the same Heinz red.” Odile grimaced.
“At least she lets you dress how you like.”
“If it was up to Lillian, I’d be wearing the puff-sleeved horrors my grandmother sends for my birthday.” Odile readjusted her dress. “So Lillian can save cash for pink-tipped cigarettes.”
“Lillian?”
“My mom.”
“So how do you? I mean your dress is—it’s like the inside of banana. In a nice way. It’s creamy.” Yuki had overheard so many pleasantly vapid girls chattering, and yet she failed at the most basic idiocies. “If your mom won’t buy you nice clothes . . .” Yuki twiddled her sunglasses.
“I steal them.” Odile grinned.
“But, how?” The dress wasn’t a lipstick that could be palmed. There was nowhere on Odile’s frame to stow such a thing.
“Aren’t you scandalized?”
Busy imagining the tactics of this fine-boned thief, Yuki had forgotten the moral question.
“How could you?” she said, but the tone came out flat, and Odile laughed as if Yuki had made a joke.
“If you like I’ll show you on Saturday.”
“Can’t, Saturday Japanese class.” She hated Japanese class. When she began, she had friends, little girls named Reiko, Jun and Nana, but they followed their fathers home. Now, Yuki was being out-calligraphied by six-year-olds at even the simplest strokes: . The gridded paper looked like a cage, and the characters felt as foreign as the country they were from; so her strokes trailed off into doodles. Her brush sliced through the horizontal and vertical bars to become birds and eyes and wings.
“After school then,” Odile said. The bell wailed. “Meet me outside?”
In science class, Mr. Schwinger—he taught math, physics and baseball—drew a cross section of the Earth on the board.
“Proportionally, the Earth’s crust isn’t even as thick as this line. We’re all standing on a fleck of chalk dust floating on molten rock.” All year Yuki had felt like wet tarmac: sticky and stinking; but she didn’t want to dry, she wanted to crack open so her molten core spilled out fire. “Now, and this will be on the test, so write it down . . .”
Yuki liked the curving anatomies of clouds and the hearts of planets, but science carved these into convection, conduction, radiation and then into strings and strings of numbers.
Odile was waiting, leaning against a tree. Generations of students had scratched their names into the trunk, but Yuki would leave without writing her name once.
“I can’t take you out like that.” Odile crinkled an eyebrow. “You’ll have to come back to my place.”
Yuki’s parents would never allow her to invite an American to their apartment. Apartment: rooms in which a person is kept apart. Yuki touched the stiff fabric of her skirt, running a hand down the stern well-stitched seam. It was the skirt of a junior secretary. Understandably, not bandit-wear. “I need a disguise?”
“I don’t steal my clothes directly. I separate greenbacks, clams, dollars from their owners.” Odile gave a slanted smile.
For a second, Yuki saw Odile, her hands wrapped around an ivory inlaid pistol, walking into the bank. Yuki heard the sharp tap of Odile’s heels and saw the kink of her lips, as she commanded the frowsy cashiers to empty their registers.
“. . . from gentlemen who drink too much and like to meet pretty girls at bars.”
> The bank dissolved into the women who sat on the stoops near her apartment. The women who looked a bit too tired, whose stockings were laddered. The women her father turned away from.
“You sell yourself?” The words came out stiff and old-fashioned, just as her father would have said them.
“God, no, borrow a wallet or two. Then, bar to subway in zero to sixty.” Odile clicked her feet together like Road-runner. “Meep meep.”
“Oh.”
“You know what men keep in their wallets? Photos of girlfriends and dogs. Women and bitches. You in?”
Yuki didn’t stay late after school or talk to men. She was a dutiful sidewalk slab of a citizen. But she’d seen something she wanted to steal so badly her fingers itched with it: this girl’s sunrise-hair.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d love that.”
A pride of dresses occupied Odile’s bed. Nylon haunches curved, and paisley rumps seemed ready to pounce. Shirts clung to the window rail. It was as if the room contained every sort of girl it was possible to be. Yuki stood with her hands behind her back. Touching anything seemed too intimate.
“This should fit.” Odile plucked something white off the bed and tossed it. It flew toward Yuki, hitting her in the chest and sliding through her open hands. She bent to retrieve it. Shaking it out, she saw it was a peasant dress, forget-me-nots stitched along the hem. Peasant seemed appropriate. Japanese fairy tales were a lot like American ones. You are a humble peasant going about your humble peasant business. And then one day, you stumble into enchantment.
Odile picked out something short and structural for herself.
“Get on with it,” Odile said. “I won’t look.”
The unbuttoning was laborious; Yuki’s starched blouse wasn’t designed for striptease. Odile looked out the window, and the low sun painted a streak of gold across her cheek. Yuki looked down at herself standing in the shadow. Her underpants were baggy cotton, and the elastic had left welts across her thighs and stomach.
A smudged mirror hung on the door, partially obscured by a paisley skirt. Yuki let her face go slack. Her eyes were too close together. The reflection looked mean and slow. Her kneebones were clunky. She didn’t have enough chest to warrant a bra. A black hair curled above one inverted nipple. How long had she been ugly?
“Done?”
“Almost.” The dress flopped over her skin. “Done.” She shifted, trying to make the hem fall comfortably. Fabric sloshed around Yuki’s ankles.
Yuki touched the braid that her mother had woven. She thought of freeing it but she was only herself in a too-big dress; loose hair would not change that. As she put on her golden glasses, Odile said, “You can’t wear them. You have to WEAR them.” Odile seemed to communicate with intonation as much as word choice. Her long fingers pulled the glasses off Yuki’s nose and settled them in her hair.
“Perfect,” Odile said. “Now, those.” She pointed to a pair of silver sandals. They were too big and as Yuki flexed her feet, the leather soles flapped. Her fairy godmother reached under the bed and removed a pair of slick white boots.
“Where did you get those?” Yuki asked. She felt as if someone had cut them from her dreaming.
“I forget.” Odile pulled the boots on in a neat flow. “Do you drink?”
Yuki stared at the faint creases in the patent leather.
“No, of course you don’t drink. Well, you’ll have to. It makes people feel weird if you don’t.”
“Um, can I use your phone?”
“Why?”
What could she tell this girl? Well, it’s just I’m the only teenager in all of America not to have a single friend. I’m not on the debate team or the chess team or any team at all, because I was too nervous to ask to join and no one ever invited me to anything, until now, and so I never stay out late, and so my parents will be worried. But Yuki only said, “Never mind, I’m ready.”
“No, you’re not, I haven’t even got to your face.”
To get to the bar they cut across Washington Square Park, one of the many places Yuki wasn’t supposed to go. Her father disapproved of the chessboards, the girls in their tie-dyed bikinis, the black boys with guitars, the white boys with guitars, and the junkies in their Indian scarves.
“Is it safe?” Yuki asked as they passed under the archway, disproportionately large for the handkerchief of green.
“Just stay out of dark corners.”
They stopped outside a bar. Low sun hit the window dirt, making it hard to see inside.
Happy Hour 5–7, proclaimed the blackboard screwed to the brick. It was six thirty. A chalk smiley face bared rectangular teeth. Under the yellow leer, she wondered what if Cinderella had arrived at the ball and realized she was a servant with no dancing skills? Anyway, the white dress made her feel less like Cinderella and more like one of those girls who gets fed to dragons or lashed to cliffs.
“Coming?” Odile held the door.
“Yes, of course.”
The room was narrow. The walls had been painted in heaving waves of watermelon pink and custard yellow. The bar countertop clearly pre-dated the mural, and the oak’s dark knots glared across at the sloppy psychedelics. Yuki hoisted the dress up as she stepped inside.
At the bar, a cluster of four boys stood around a wicker basket of fried chicken. They were already drunk, and their gums glittered with saliva.
“What should I order?” Yuki whispered.
But Odile only took a step backward, knocking into one of them.
“Hey!” He looked up in irritation.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there.”
As he looked at Odile, his face slackened, then lifted into a grin.
“What’re you drinking?”
“Two beers,” Odile said. Yuki shifted forward to stand level with Odile, horizontally level at least. Vertically Odile plus boots was half a foot higher than Yuki in sandals.
“We’re shipping off,” a different boy said. They wore tight T-shirts, and their necks seemed too thin. A boy wearing a Sgt. Pepper–style jacket handed some bills to the bartender.
“Here you go ladies.”
Odile pressed one of the gold-glass beer bottles into Yuki’s hand. The boy’s buttons shimmered. His hair flowed around his ears like maple syrup. Odile tilted her head at Yuki, and her gold hair seemed to curl in laughter as the boy put his thin leather wallet down on the stool. Yuki edged toward it, but Odile shook, no.
The boys were all named things like Patrick, Fergus and Colin.
“Odial?”
“Odeel,” Odile corrected. “I picked it myself.”
Yuki thought, so this is a thing you say.
“And this is Yuki. You-Key.”
“What, you two couldn’t be called Alice or Mary, something we didn’t need a spelling bee to say?”
“This way you won’t forget us. Or confuse us with some girl from Brooklyn.”
Yuki longed to introduce herself as Alice or Mary. Girls at the Japanese school regularly chose American names for their expat years, but her father had forbidden it. In the muddle of her own name, she realized she no longer remembered which boy was which. Or if any of them had actually been called Patrick. She’d only absorbed the blur of Irish sounds and the way their otherwise American voices twanged with their own names. Yuki often forgot her family weren’t the only ones far from home.
Sgt. Pepper boy talked about Brooklyn, the war, how he was going to learn to fly a plane. A silver chain lifted with each swell of his neck. On the chain was a silver cross and on the silver cross was a silver man. Jesus’s feet were pointed like a tiny ballerina’s.
“Like it?” he asked. “Ma’s crucifix. She gave it to me when I enlisted.” At school there were whispers of a draft to come, but until then the assorted brothers and boyfriends planned to stay safe in colleges, concert halls, hot dog stands and libraries.
Yuki looked over to Odile; she wished they’d practiced what to say. Instead she’d been forced to “stop wiggling” while Odile glued
nylon lashes to Yuki’s lower lids. Yuki blinked feeling their extra weight. Odile was conducting the remaining three boys. As she gesticulated, each finger seemed connected to a different boy’s chin. One flick of a nail tugged out a corresponding nod. The late-afternoon sun sliced through the cigarette smoke and bounced off the beer-stained floor. Outside, a child whooped, cutting through the bar’s music.
“You’re Catholic?” Yuki asked.
“Guys, guys. Am I Catholic?”
They laughed. Yuki flushed. She knew all Irish boys were Catholic. She’d meant, did he believe in the magic of the tiny silver man? But her mouth was clumsy.
“Don’t look like that,” he said. “You can try it on if you like.”
He was standing close, looping the chain around her neck. Stars of sweat broke through his T-shirt. She wondered why he didn’t take the jacket off. His fingers were warm where they glanced against the back of her neck. Freckles shone on his neck like dropped pennies. Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.
“Sorry, the catch is kind of sticky.”
New customers swung through the doors and pressed past her. Yuki tilted forward on the tips of her sandals.
“There we go,” he said.
The boy pushed Yuki forward so all the others could see. He twirled her on the spot, showing her off from each angle. Yuki could go whole days, whole weeks, without anyone touching her at all. Her mother hugged her only in moments of pain, when a distant relative died or Yuki failed a test, never for the joy of holding. Yuki caught a stool and sat down, dizzy with the attention as much as the spinning.
“Now all she needs is a rosary,” said one. “And she’ll be a good girl from Donegal.”
“If you wanted an Irish girl,” said another, “you should’ve stayed in Brooklyn.”
“A toast,” said the third, “to girls from elsewhere.”
She hadn’t drunk any of her beer. Odile was smiling at her, and Yuki smiled back with all her teeth. Odile had curled her little finger into one boy’s denim pockets.
“So,” Yuki’s boy asked. “Where’re you from?”
Harmless Like You Page 2