When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  When she was accepted at UCLA on a state scholarship that paid tuition and a modest living allowance, they celebrated—all three of them, though Beverly’s mother was by then having difficulty walking and hadn’t left the house in months—with a lobster dinner at a hotel on Ocean Boulevard overlooking the sea. The first year Kat lived at home, then went into student housing as a sophomore, so that they saw her only on weekends. After a while she began skipping a weekend now and again, then two in a row, pleading her workload. Sometimes a whole month would go by before she’d come home, and when she did come she brought a duffel of dirty laundry with her, which Beverly was only too glad to wash and fold and stack neatly for her, all the while trying to keep from worrying, from nagging. Because Kat was too thin and she wore her hair long and parted in the middle, like the hippies they read about in the paper and saw on TV, and like the hippies she wore flared hip-huggers with stars and flowers stitched into them and blouses that showed off her midriff, which anybody—not just her mother—would have considered provocative. And what about drugs? Marijuana? Did she use marijuana?

  Kat never said a word about it. She never mentioned her grades either, though when the reports came at the end of the semester, Beverly—who would never dream of opening her daughter’s mail—couldn’t help quizzing her about them. Was everything all right? Yes, Kat assured her, everything’s fine. And added, in a tone Beverly didn’t like, Stop harassing me. In her senior year, she started dating seriously. She was in love, that was what she told her mother over the phone and on the odd weekends when she came home, but who was the boy? What was his name? What was his family like? What was he majoring in? He was a student, wasn’t he? He doesn’t smoke marijuana or anything, does he? What does his father do? Where are they from? This went on for a whole weekend, from dinner Friday night till Sunday morning at breakfast, the washer churning on the enclosed porch and a pale tired sun smeared like grease over everything in the kitchen. “You can’t even tell me his name?” Beverly said, setting a plate of waffles and two poached eggs down before her. “Your own mother? I mean, what’s the secret? Is he a dwarf or something”—she let out a laugh—“or a Communist? Or is it us. Your nana and me. You’re ashamed of us, is that it?”

  “Greg,” Kat said finally, her face twisted in sudden fury. “His name’s Greg. All right?”

  Her mother, who’d been hounding her since she stepped in the door Friday night, looked as if she’d been slapped, and Kat, despite herself, instantly regretted it. “Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ve been under a lot of pressure, that’s all. At school. I just need some space, okay?”

  At the table, her fingers gnarled and her head bent close to her task, her nana peeled shrimp for scampi as if she’d never done anything else in her entire life. The shrimp, gray and denuded, lay mounded in a glass bowl while their translucent shells accumulated on a sheet torn from the Times. She never glanced up, though there was revolution in the air.

  Her mother gave her a hurt look, bunching her lips over a strip of green pepper she kept shifting round her mouth like a toothpick. She said, “I don’t want to pry, but—”

  “Then don’t.”

  The next time she came home, for Christmas break, her mother emerged from the kitchen the minute the key turned in the lock of the front door. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel and her smile of greeting flared and died as she crossed the room to peck a kiss to Kat’s cheek before turning to the table in the front hall to retrieve an envelope there and hand it to her. “This came for you yesterday,” she said, fixing her eyes on her.

  It was from Greg—Kat could see that at a glance. She’d had a late exam in childhood psychology, but he’d finished earlier in the week and gone home to Santa Barbara to be with his parents for the holidays. He was going to drive down to pick her up the day after Christmas for a camping trip to Ensenada they’d been planning for the last month, six days alone on the beach and in the tent at night, in the same sleeping bag, like (Greg’s joke) Robert Jordan and his Little Rabbit. She might have blushed when she took the envelope, folded it once and stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn’t say anything, but her mother was watching her so closely she might have been lasering right through her like in that scene in Goldfinger.

  “Take-sue,” she said, mispronouncing the name, “is that Hungarian? Or Bohunk? Or what? For the life of us, Nana and I couldn’t figure it out.”

  She wanted to say, You don’t have to, but instead, just to watch the awareness sink deep into her mother’s face, she said, “Takesue. Three syllables. And the last one is suey, like chop suey.”

  “Chop suey?” her mother repeated, looking puzzled. There was the sound of voices carrying down the street and through the glass of the front window, drunks coming back from the bars along the boardwalk. She let out a nervous laugh. “You don’t mean—? He isn’t Chinese, is he?”

  This was the moment she’d been dancing around since the day Greg had come up to her in the commons, his hair long and thick and shining—longer than George Harrison’s, longer than anybody’s in any band she’d ever seen—bent over the table where she was sitting with her girlfriend Pattie and said, Weren’t you in Bieler’s class last semester?

  “No, Mom,” she said, still standing there in the hallway, the letter tucked safely away, her bag over one shoulder and her peacoat hanging limp at her knees, “he’s not Chinese.” She took a moment, shrugging out from under the bag and looking her mother square in the face. “Takesue isn’t a Chinese name, it’s Japanese.”

  And then, before her mother could gasp or snort or shout or spin her head around on her shoulders and scream, Japanese? You’re going with a Jap? After what they did to your father? she was across the room, down the hall and firmly shutting the door to her room behind her.

  When Greg came up the steps on the day after Christmas, his arms laden with gift-wrapped packages and his father’s maroon Dodge Charger sitting at the curb behind him like a rocket ship at rest, her mother pulled open the door on a vision of beauty, only she didn’t see it that way. “Greg!” Kat called out, sailing across the room to him while her mother staggered back in shock, because not only was Greg a hippie, in a tie-dyed poncho, silver-striped pants, scuffed boots and a wide-brimmed hat with an eagle’s feather jutting proudly from the band, he was Asian too. Worse than Asian: Japanese. With a Fu Manchu mustache that framed his jaw in two dangling transparent wisps. Kat took his hand, led him into the front hall, saying, “Mom, I want to—” but her mother was gone, retreating into the bedroom at the back of the house.

  She’d tried to warn him—My mother’s a little strange, you know, after the war and all, I mean, World War II—but she knew him well enough to see that he was as shocked as her mother was, shocked and hurt. Older people, the ignorant and the hidebound, with their fat white faces and five-dollar haircuts, might have derided him for dressing the way he did, for being a hippie, but that he could take in stride. Racism was another thing altogether. He was fifth generation, as American as anybody, his family was prosperous, with their own seafood business based out of Santa Barbara, and he was going to take his place in American society whether anybody liked it or not—and if he went out in the street and protested against the war in Vietnam, that was his privilege and his right. As was the way he chose to dress and what sort of records he played on the stereo and the drugs he put in his own body with the freest will in the world. That was Greg. That was the way he felt. And if the world was nothing but combat, so be it. She felt choked. Her mind was jumping from one misery to another like a cricket on a hot sidewalk. “Here,” she whispered, and she took his hand and pulled him forward.

  Shoulders slumped, eyes down, he followed her stiffly into the living room, where her grandmother was sitting in the armchair, watching one of her soap operas.

  She took the packages from him and set them down on the sofa. Then she raised her voice so her grandmother could hear and said, “Let me introduce you to my grandmother. Nan
a, this is Greg.”

  Over the past year her grandmother had slipped into confusion, her face immobile, her gaze dulled, her hands jittery in her lap. With an effort, she raised her eyes and lifted her trembling chin. Greg bent forward, offered his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he murmured, but she just stared at the place where his hand was and said nothing in return.

  “Greg’s my boyfriend, Nana—the one I’ve been telling you about?” she said, feeling cold suddenly, chilled, as if the house were a glacier that had just split in two, irreparably, forever. Turning to him, she said, “Nana’s a little hard of hearing”—a smile—“aren’t you, Nana? But my mother, I guess she must be changing into something a little dressier . . . or something. You wait. I’ll go get her.”

  His voice was terse—he was in the chasm of the glacier too. “Don’t bother,” he said.

  She always liked to think it was during the vacation in Mexico that she got pregnant with Alma, but that couldn’t have been because Alma didn’t come along until October, so it must have been after they got back to school. At any rate, despite the fact that she was on the pill and on a conscious level didn’t have even the slightest inkling of the tiniest fleeting desire to get pregnant, or not yet anyway, she did, and that pregnancy froze her inside the glacier until it split all over again. She couldn’t go home. She didn’t. She graduated (her mother tearful at the ceremony, without knowing what she was crying over, or the extent of it anyway) and moved in with Greg, in Santa Barbara, and he started working on one of his father’s boats, diving for lobster and abalone off the back side of Santa Cruz.

  At first they lived with Greg’s parents in a house on the mesa, just above the marina, but the house—a big rambling craftsman with upper and lower porches and views of the sea out of the south- and east-facing windows—was crowded for all its size. There were Greg’s five siblings, all younger than he and perpetually embroiled in their internecine disputes, his father’s mother, two bachelor uncles and an assortment of cats, dogs and caged and evilly cackling birds. Though they had a room to themselves, Kat just couldn’t feel at home. Her mother-in-law fought off every attempt she made to contribute—she wouldn’t let her chop vegetables, wash dishes, even take out the trash, and every time she settled into the sofa or wandered into the kitchen she felt like an intruder, which, in fact, she was. And no matter how utterly without prejudice she felt herself to be, it was nonetheless strange to find herself living in a Japanese household—or Japanese American, as she was constantly correcting herself.

  It wasn’t that they were all that much different from anybody else—they ate steaks and burgers and hot dogs and all the rest of it, maybe more fish because fish was the family business—but that anything, any other household, even if it had been right next door to her mother’s house in Venice, would have seemed disorienting, especially in her condition. She was used to silence and order, a house in which three generations of women lived and worked in peace without the disruptive presence of men, children, pets. But here was chaos, here was the other, a new association and a new regime. The smells were different, the little rituals surrounding meals, where people sat, the noise and confusion of the kids and their mob of friends—even the dogs, a pair of Akitas, were like nothing she’d ever seen, their heads as broad and flat as a bear’s, their habits secretive, and where did they do their business? Time and again she’d surprised them in her bed and twice she’d found the blankets suspiciously damp.

  Within the month she began pestering Greg to look for a place of their own—a little privacy, that was all she wanted, nothing against his family—and when Alma came along and she was nursing and shutting herself up all day in her room just so she wouldn’t have to listen to one more repetition of her mother-in-law’s dicta on the subject of child rearing, it became imperative. By spring of the following year, 1969, she got her wish. Greg came home from work one clammy socked-in evening, swept his hair out of his face and announced in a voice that could hardly contain its excitement that they were moving to the harbor, to live on a boat he’d bought for $3,600, one-third down, the rest due after the first year. But for the baby, she would have leapt into his arms. As it was, she took hold of him in one arm while cradling Alma in the other, and the three of them danced round the room till Greg’s uncle Billy, who worked nights and slept in the room directly beneath them, mounted the stairs to complain about the noise.

  The Black Gold was a working boat, a converted thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser with an open rear deck of fiberglass in place of the original wood planking and a compartment for the catch below; the main cabin and sleeping quarters were aft. There was a galley the size of an icebox, an icebox the size of an orange crate, a built-in table that folded up when not in use (which was never), a little upright coffin of a head and a plywood slab, decorated with a disintegrating foam mattress and a sleeping bag that gave off a mélange of festering odors under the bow. Showers, toilets, laundry were available in the marina. Kat liked to joke that the boat gave a new definition to damp. Every garment, every diaper, every towel might as well have been a sponge, and the only relief was when the sun shone and the wind picked up and things could be strung out to dry. On days when she was in harbor, that is. And those days were rare, at least at first.

  She’d wake in the dark to Alma’s cries, take her to bed with them to feed her, then get up and make Greg his breakfast, fried rice, four eggs, mackerel or abalone or Canadian bacon seared in the pan, toasted cheese, coffee by the vat. And then, when his partner, Mickey Mans, arrived looking hungover, starved and stoned in equal measures, she took the baby and went up the hill to her mother-in-law’s for the day, or walked all the way up Anacapa Street to the library to sit and browse and play with Alma till she was so bored she could barely draw another breath. But they were living on the cheap and they had their privacy and she was waiting for him at the slip each night with a bag of groceries when he chugged in through the mouth of the harbor. She became a genius of the quick but nutritious meal, stir-fry mainly, cauliflower, bok choy, mushrooms, snow peas, bean sprouts—whatever looked good in the market—augmented by the halibut, lobster, crab and rockfish she’d buy for next to nothing from the fishermen when they came in.

  And uni, though she never really developed a taste for it. Uni—sea urchin—was what Greg and Mickey were after, what they were exclusively after, because the abalone fishery was taking a nosedive from over-harvesting, groundfish numbers were down and lobsters seasonal, and Greg’s father had found a niche market for the urchins, which he was selling to a distributor in L.A. for transshipment to Japan. They were among the first to exploit the resource, but by the late seventies, when Alma was working her way through fourth, fifth and sixth grade and thinking that living on a boat was the most natural thing in the world, the real boom set in. Urchins, previously considered pests, were suddenly the hottest thing on the market. The Japanese couldn’t get enough of them. It was the roe they were after—or the gonads actually, tangerine-colored organs arranged in a star shape inside the spiny shell, which were extracted by the wholesaler, packed in ice and flown to Tokyo overnight. Black gold, that was what people called the urchins, though they shaded to red and purple under the sun, and the money was good, the money was boss, out of sight, too good to believe.

  By the time Alma was in sixth grade they’d bought their own house on a back street within walking distance of the harbor, and the dampness, the mold, the cramped quarters and the smell of fish so overpowering they might as well have been living in the muck at the bottom of the sea, were behind them. It wasn’t perfect—for the first few months Alma slept fitfully, waking in tears because her bed wouldn’t move and the floor never rocked or gave or swayed, and when she did sleep it was on the carpet beneath the bed, as if she were still squeezed into her berth under the foredeck—but for Kat it was night and day. Having a house away from the water where you had some space to move around in and didn’t have to worry all night about your daughter pitching overboard and drowning and you c
ould walk across the kitchen floor without water squishing under your heels was cleansing, revolutionary, liberating, not to mention what it did for their sex life—she couldn’t count the nights she and Greg had had to steal out of the cabin to make goose-pimpled love on the foredeck or on the truncated leather seat in the cockpit so Alma wouldn’t hear. And then there was the minor miracle of Mrs. Meehan, the woman they found to watch Alma after school, freeing up Kat to work the boat along with Greg and Mickey.

  She became their tender, which allowed them to spend more time harvesting urchins and less hassling with the equipment, and the change brought her back to life after the years spent rotating between the library, the Takesue household and the part-time jobs she took just to drive down the boredom once Alma started school. The first few days were rough, but she caught on quickly—Greg was patient with her, even if his partner, especially in the mornings before the first dive, tended to be a bear—but within a month her confidence began to grow along with the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and if it wasn’t exactly feminine to have an upper body made of iron, it felt good. And so did being away from shore, outdoors, under the open sky.

  The tender on an urchin boat is responsible for taking care of all the tasks the divers would prefer having done for them, from dropping and setting the anchor over a promising spot, to laying out the wetsuits and hoses, working the winch to bring the catch over the side, keeping an eye on the air compressor when the divers are down in thirty feet of icy swirling water and making a nice hot lunch to fortify them for the afternoon dives. Not to mention digging out the cold beers for the ride home. While they were down, usually in thirty-minute shifts—thirty minutes was about average for filling the steel-rimmed bag with urchins—she would entertain herself as best she could, reading through paperbacks and the piles of out-of-date magazines she got from a friend of Greg’s who worked for a dentist, doing pencil sketches of the island bluffs or just staring off into space and dreaming, one watchful eye fixed on the snaking yellow hoses as they cut the surface and plunged into invisibility. Her life, finally, seemed to fit her wanting. She’d never been happier.