“There’s bound to be trouble when you marry out of your race,” they say. “Bound to be complications.”
On her walks around the camp she lingers by the groups of old Issei men, those born in Japan, who cluster together rubbing their hands and stamping their feet against the cold. They hardly know how to be either, or what to do with their days. They would like to huddle inside but, unable to tolerate the beaten look of their wives, the sense of loss in their families, they prefer to face the deathly cold. Their breath freezes on the air as they crowd around the fires they light in discarded tin cans. They speak of the war in hushed tones, wonder how it’s going, how Japan is faring. Perhaps they never should have left the old country, never should have sired American children. Old loyalties stir in them, they are children of the Emperor, after all. They play go, an ancient game with mysterious rules involving black and white stones. The game attracts a rapt audience of their peers, who squat on the ground watching the stones intently. One old man sketches them as they play, with a piece of charcoal on cardboard, making swift flowing strokes, stopping every so often to blow some heat into his bony fingers. Satomi likes his work, thinks him a genius of the understated.
The veins on the back of the old men’s hands rise thick, dark as bark, to join the burn marks they suffer from getting too close to the red-hot cans.
At first she had watched the matches and, like the old men, she had stood too close to the braziers and burned her hands. But after a while she lost interest. The game moves too slowly to hold her attention for long, and something about the players’ patience seems too accepting to her. The fight has gone out of the old men. It’s worrying.
“Playing games as though everything is normal,” she says to Tamura. “And they hardly seem to notice the cold even though their lips are blue.”
“They notice it, all right, Satomi, but what else can they do to forget their shame? It will be better for them in summer. The air will be sweet, they won’t need their fires. Just think of it, we will be able to leave our door open, to breathe outside without burning our lungs.”
“Some of them might die of the cold before then.”
“Perhaps that is what they hope for.”
Dog Days
Summer, when it comes, is not without its own trials. Rains flood the latrines, so that excrement runs down the alley and bubbles up beneath the barracks, where it settles in thick slimy pools. Drawn to the toxic smell, flies swarm, causing the residents in the Bakers’ row of barracks to name their road “Sewer Alley.”
The children make a game of the infestations, seeing how many flies they can collect. They stack them up in old gallon jugs and empty bottles, any container they can lay their hands on. One boy proudly claims to have collected two thousand of the dirty, dark-bodied things.
With the winter behind them, Sewer Alley is always crowded now with inmates who prefer to live their summer lives outside. Used now to Satomi’s aloof manner, and charmed by Tamura, their neighbors greet them with bows and good-mornings.
Satomi talks sometimes with the girls of her own age in the alley, but she hasn’t made a special friend of any of them, doesn’t want to. Lily’s fickleness has made her cautious. There’s a boy named Ralph a couple of barracks away, whom she often talks with. Ralph’s a freethinker with an irrepressible desire to right wrongs. She likes to listen to him, likes his knockout smile. She’s more interested in his friend, though, her neighbor’s son Haru, whom she can hardly look at, he’s so dazzling, so bright.
Unlike her, Ralph and Haru have chosen to attend the new high school, which is being held in the open on the ground by the mess hall. Books have to be shared, pencils too, and sometimes it’s just too hot to sit on the earth with the sun scalding your head till you feel as though it will split open like an overcooked squash.
“It’s worth it just to learn, though,” Ralph says.
Volunteers are hurrying to finish building the wood and tar-paper block intended to house the students, to keep them from the extremes of the Owens Valley seasons.
“It will be better once we are inside,” Ralph says. “You should come, Satomi. Don’t let them steal your education too.”
“I’ll think about it.” She knows, though, that she won’t. School holds no attraction for her. It would be like returning to childhood, and in the vein of her father she doesn’t care to be told what to do.
She had thought Ralph to be like her at first, half and half, but he turned out to be a different sort of half-and-half altogether.
“I am like you,” he told her. “Only I’m half Mexican, half Irish.”
He doesn’t even have the one required drop of Japanese blood to explain his presence in the camp. It had been his strong feelings of kinship and outrage that had brought him to, and keeps him, in Manzanar.
“I grew up in the Temple-Beaudry neighborhood in Los Angeles,” he tells her. “We were a mixed bunch, Basques, Jews, Koreans, Negroes. It didn’t matter to us, we liked who we liked.”
When Ralph talks it’s like being in the light, Satomi thinks. He’s a special person, sixteen but a man already, not afraid to say what he thinks. He had been a high school student when the order for the Japanese to vacate their homes had come.
“They were my friends,” he says. “They’d done nothing to deserve it. It was unfair and cruel. We were taught the Constitution at school and we were proud of it. Now it seems like it was all just words.”
Ralph’s mother is dead, and his father, thinking him to be at summer school, didn’t miss him at first. It came as a shock to learn that he had joined the Japanese students, his fellows from Belmont High, as they had boarded the buses to Manzanar.
His sister wrote often after they discovered where he was, pleading with him to come home. Ralph, though, insisted that he wanted to stay with his buddies. Eventually his father gave him permission to remain in Manzanar.
“They must be proud of you, Ralph,” Satomi had said when he’d first told her his story. He had given one of his smiles and shrugged.
Word of his act was hot news for a while in the camp. It’s no wonder, Satomi thinks, that he is so popular, or that he has become a Manzanar celebrity.
“How wonderful that he should do this for us,” it’s said.
“Ralph Lazo will be spoken of long after we are all dead.”
Despite that it’s summer, the dust storms are as promiscuous as ever. There are mornings when they wake in a shroud of grime covering them from head to toe.
“We will make this place ours,” Tamura determines, doing her daily sweep. “If we care for it, we need not feel shame.”
Satomi raises her eyes to heaven, wonders if her mother has gone quite mad.
Their neighbor to the left of them, Eriko Okihiro, Haru’s mother, is of the same frame of mind as Tamura.
“My mother lives with us,” she told Tamura with a wry smile at their first meeting. “I don’t want her to feel ashamed of my housekeeping.”
The Okihiros, all four of them, jostle for space in their barrack, which they have divided in two with a piece of sacking.
“We are two widows, a boy, and a girl,” Eriko explained with pride. “We are used to better, of course.”
Eriko, along with her old mother Naomi and her sulky daughter Yumi, sleep on one side of the sacking divide, her only son Haru, head of the household since his father’s death, on the other.
Haru strides about the camp and the girls sneak sideways glances at him, blushing when he looks at them. Satomi is no exception, although she affects disinterest. He has to duck his head when going through doors, which embarrasses him and delights the girls. He is dark-skinned, dark-haired, too serious for his age.
“There’s a bloom about him,” Tamura says. “A pleasing sort of energy.”
At seventeen years and one week old, Haru likes to remind people that he is in his eighteenth year.
“He’s at that halfway stage,” Eriko muses. “More man than boy, and proud, you know?”
She looks for failings in him like those she had seen in Artie but can find none. He is nothing like Artie. He isn’t a show-off, for one thing, and somehow his bossiness is reassuring.
“You should listen to Ralph,” he says to her. “School would do you good.”
She puzzles over the fact that there is something familiar about him, as though in some unexplained way she already knows him. He is interested in her, that’s for sure, but she senses his disapproval too, his irritation with her. He is always quick to criticize.
“You should work on those manners,” he says. “It costs nothing to be polite.”
It feels preachy to her, but it could be his way of flirting. He’s hard to read.
The Okihiros came direct to Manzanar from Los Angeles. In their previous lives they had run a fabric shop in Little Tokyo, and there is something of the city in the way they talk, in their quick step. They seem to shine brighter than those that came from California’s farmlands.
“You would have loved our cottons,” Eriko tells Tamura. “We had striped and gingham—and silk too—well, special orders of silk—so beautiful—so …” Her voice trembles with the memory of it.
After a while she stops speaking of her old life. It is too painful to go on boasting about what you have lost, what you may never get back. And just thinking of the fabrics, their vibrant colors, the clean glazed crispness of them, tops up the hurt in her.
The Okihiros spend a lot of time sitting on the steps of their barrack, beside which they have made a miniature rock garden. Its elegant simplicity has inspired others to do the same, and now in Sewer Alley stone gardens are quite the thing. Such refinements, though, are not for the Sanos, who live on the other side of the Bakers—they think the effort a pointless exercise.
“Might as well put a dress on a monkey,” Mr. Sano says.
Mr. Sano, a wizened little man, is in the habit of touching his wife in public, pulling her caveman-style into their barrack in the afternoons so that everyone knows what they are up to. Never mind their daughter-in-law, or their grandchildren, who are billeted with them.
Mrs. Sano finds it hard to look people in the eye in case she should meet with a disapproving stare. She feels too old to be the object of her husband’s copious passion; besides, his behavior is not the Japanese way. But then, her husband has always taken his own path, lived in ignorance of others’ sensitivities. There is nothing to be done about it.
“A monkey in a dress could be cute,” Satomi says to Tamura, causing them a fit of the giggles, which turns for Tamura into a bout of coughing.
Despite that Tamura and Satomi are treated by their fellow inmates with a measure of reserve, Eriko is pleased to have them as neighbors. She has befriended them enthusiastically, thinking Tamura delightful, a kind and modest woman in need of a friend.
“She is shy, I know, but charming, don’t you think, Mother? I liked her from the first.”
“She’s too thin,” old Naomi says pragmatically. “Ill, I think.”
All the Okihiros glow with health, notwithstanding the unappetizing diet at Manzanar: canned wieners and beans and watery corn that tastes only of sugar. The women agree, though, that it is getting better. Sometimes now there is miso, and even on occasions pickled vegetables.
Eriko’s hair grows thick, her teeth are long and white, and her face has a rosy flush even when she isn’t exerting herself. Her five-foot-three frame is built so squarely that she appears to have no waist at all. She is energetic for a woman of her weight, and strong too. She can pick Tamura up without effort.
“You’re hardly an armful,” she tells her.
In comparison to Eriko’s bulk, Tamura’s slight frame appears sweetly girlish.
“She’s so pretty,” Eriko remarks to her mother.
“Hmm,” Naomi grunts, thinking that unless things improve with Tamura, her pallor will soon be a match for the mold that is inching its way up their walls.
“We are lucky to have Eriko and her family as neighbors,” Tamura says. Some would have turned their back on us.”
“Plenty did, Mama, some still do.”
Those who came to Manzanar without family, the old and the bereaved, the paralyzed, even, have to bear the indignity of sharing with strangers. One poor woman, for reasons no one can understand, was separated from her husband and billeted with strangers. Now her husband shares with six men, and she is told that nothing can be done about it.
All of them, though, had resisted being housed with the Japanese woman and her half-caste daughter. Things are bad enough without the shame of that. Just by looking at the girl you could tell she’d be trouble.
Every time it seemed likely that one or the other of them were about to be paired with the Bakers, they had stepped aside and joined another line, leaving Tamura and Satomi standing on their own. The guards got the message eventually and didn’t push it. You had to choose your battles.
“I’d share with you any day,” one of them wisecracked to Satomi. “Just let me know when you get lonely, sugar.”
“You’ve been lucky,” Haru says. “Most likely you and Tamura would have had an old woman forced on you. You would have had nothing but complaints. And if it had been an old man you would have ended up doing everything for him. And just think of it, you have a room all to yourselves.”
“I guess. Mother is a very private person, so she appreciates the space.” She is thinking of Tamura’s shame at her cough, her night cries.
“Yes, she is a fine lady,” Haru says.
“She’s a bit like you, Haru. She looks for the good in things.”
“And you look for trouble where there is none. Anyway, I was thinking of asking your mother if she would let me use your room to study. Only when you are out, of course. My grandmother thinks that I can read and talk to her at the same time. I find myself going over the same paragraph again and again.”
“Ask her. I guess she won’t mind. I’m surprised you were allowed to bring books in, though.”
“I only have a few, not enough for what I need. It bothered my mother more than the guards. She thought I should have used the space for more practical things. But if you think about it, books are more practical than dishes and bedding. Dishes and bedding can’t promise a future, can’t make you forget that you are not free.”
“Would I like your books, Haru?”
“You? Well, maybe you would, I don’t know. Did you enjoy reading at school? The classroom books, I mean.”
“I guess I did.”
“Well, it’s good to read. We won’t always be in this place. We should use the time here to make our future better, not let it slip through our hands like sand.”
“Perhaps I’ll borrow your books sometime. Okay?”
“Maybe. But are you sure you want to?”
“I do, I really do.”
“You would have to be careful with them.”
She can tell that he’s unwilling, that he doesn’t trust her with his precious books.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if you don’t want to share them.” She can’t keep the irritation from her voice. “I hear there’s to be a library here soon, anyway. You’re not the only one who wants to read, you know?”
“I know that.” His voice is full of apology. Look, I’ve just finished This Side of Paradise, you can borrow it if you like.
“Oh, Fitzgerald, I�
��ve read it,” she lies.
“Really! You’ve read the whole thing?”
He sounds just like Mr. Beck.
Taking her lead from Eriko, Tamura divides their barrack using the silk butterfly robe that Aaron had loved her to wear. She threads a stick through the arms, balancing each end on a rusty nail so that it hangs suspended, a pink quivering scarecrow.
“Oh, Tamura,” Eriko enthuses. “It’s beautiful, not real silk, of course, but beautiful just the same.”
Tamura looks at the garment with disbelief—it is a design from ancient times, a piece of history that surely belonged to a different woman than the one she is now. What had induced her to pack such a thing? At the sight of its brilliance in dusty Manzanar, her thoughts turn to images of geishas, of obedience, of Aaron. Why had she allowed him to keep her in the last century? Why had she attempted to fix Satomi there with her?
“I would never wear such a thing here!” she exclaims to Satomi. “It would look ridiculous. I will never wear it again. You need some privacy, I can’t think of a better use for it.”
Fingering the robe, Satomi has to swallow hard to keep the tears at bay. Her saliva seems to have dried to sand. The silly, pretty thing is the very trinity of Aaron, Tamura, and her childhood self.
It isn’t much privacy, a roughly hung gown that moves in the drafts as though alive, but she is grateful for it. She rests behind it stretched out on her iron cot, one of Haru’s books in hand, imagining him doing the same on the other side of the thin divide between them. Her hand goes to the wall, where she holds it as though she can feel his warmth heating her palm. Sometimes late into the night she hears him turning the pages of his book, sighing.
Behind her pink screen she can deal discreetly with her monthly bleeds, while on the other side of it, Tamura, hawking up the muck from her lungs, indulges the idea of privacy too.
A Girl Like You Page 12