“We’re going to be late, Jack. It was so nice to meet you, Angela. I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again.”
I wait until they pull their Honda out of the driveway and into the street. Mrs. O turns and waves to me. I look down, hoping that I have dodged the light.
As soon as they leave, I race down the street on my skateboard.
For the first time in several days, I feel totally free.
Mixed-up Mon
Gardena is flat and unadorned; nothing looks organic or particularly wild. The buildings and the three-bedroom ranch homes seem snapped into place like pieces of Lego.
I stand on my skateboard, and with some quick thrusts of my right foot, I am rolling down the concrete road. The pavement is rough, full of cracks and holes, and the ride is jerky, as well. I turn a couple of corners, move over to the sidewalk, and then approach a business district. There is a series of small storefronts squished together like friends conspiring to keep secrets. Only the Mexican pastry shop seems interesting, and as I roll past, I almost bump into a middle-aged woman doing her weekend shopping.
I have about a dollar in my pocket, so I go to a corner liquor store and buy some sour gummy worms. Bright blue, orange, red, and yellow, they are tart enough to make me cringe.
I go down more streets; I don’t recognize the trees growing beside the sidewalks, and their unfamiliarity upsets me. Instead of being heavy and full, they look a bit stunted, controlled. Smog trees, I call them, and begin to feel better. The smog trees, deformed like something inside me, could be my friends.
I’m looking at some of them when I arrive at a neat black wrought iron fence that comes up to my chin. Behind it are two giant cement Japanese lanterns and a huge structure with a sloped roof. The Buddhist church. Although I’ve been here twelve times before, the white building seems kind of new to me. I notice a pretty crest—called a mon, I remember—right below where the two sides of the roof meet. Mon seem always to be inside of circles. This mon looks like two flattened furry fern leaves tied together.
I skateboard down a large boulevard and then can see a big overpass and a school. The school, a wallflower attempting to blend in and be unnoticed, is a nondescript tan. Beyond the main building is an open yard with outdoor basketball, handball, and tetherball courts and picnic tables. And a dozen skateboarders.
Some merely circle the tetherball courts. The more adventurous ones sail down the stairs or grind their wooden decks down metal railings.
I’m watching them from the other side of a chain-link fence when one of the skateboarders finally rolls toward me. A guy, kind of cute, maybe thirteen. He wears a white T-shirt and an open yellow plaid shirt. He has long dark-brown hair that curls up a little. As he gets closer, I notice that he has sideburns and a light mustache.
“Hey,” he says. He kicks up his skateboard and I see the huge skull image on its deck.
I look down and tighten my grip on my skateboard. My fingers are still sticky from the gummy worms. “Hello.”
“Are those OJs?”
“Huh?”
“Your wheels. They look like Santa Cruz OJs. They’re classic. From the eighties.”
“No,” I say, “they’re just regular ones. Your skateboard’s nice.” I blush at how stupid that sounds.
“You go to this school?”
I shake my head. “I’m from Mill Valley.”
The skateboarder frowns.
“It’s near San Francisco.”
“You’re pretty far from San Francisco.”
“I’m staying with my grandparents. Not far from here.”
“Cool. Come out with us.” He grasps the chain-link fence and I notice that his knuckles look knotty and his fingernails have fine white lines on them.
I’m not wearing a watch, but I know that it’s late. I shake my head. “I have to get going.”
“Well, next week, then. We’re here every Sunday afternoon.” He backs up and begins walking toward his friends. I reposition my head so that I can place the boy in one of the diamonds in the fence.
“Hey,” he says, turning back. “What’s your name?”
“Angie,” I say, and he turns his side to me, signaling that he has not heard me, his hand cupping his ear.
“Angie,” I yell in a strange voice that doesn’t sound like mine. It is forceful and clear—the voice of a girl who knows who she is. What will this girl do? The voice’s power scares me and I don’t waste any time skateboarding down the sidewalk, away from the playground and the pedestrian bridge.
When I get home, the whole family is in the living room, waiting for me.
“Angie, where were you? We were close to calling the police,” Grandma says.
“I was skateboarding around the school.”
“You can’t just go for hours on end without telling us. We’re responsible for you. You could have called us; you have a cell phone now.”
“I left it here. Besides, Gramps knew I was going.”
My grandfather drops his chin to his chest. I know then that although he has the love, he doesn’t have the spine to cover for me.
“The woman next door told us that she had seen you go down the street on your skateboard.”
Who? Oh, that lady next door, Mrs. O. “I don’t like her,” I say before thinking.
Grandma looks slightly pleased. “Why do you say that?” she asks.
I can feel the sweat balling up on my nose. “I don’t like the way she looks at me.”
“Now, An-jay, you don’t even know her—” says Gramps.
“She does have that look,” interrupts Grandma.
“Michi—”
“Well, anyway…” Grandma composes herself. “You can’t be skateboarding in the street like that. You might get yourself run over.”
I want to escape to somewhere. But there is no place to run to, except for the bathroom.
“Your dad called,” Janet says as I walk toward the hallway.
I stop. “What did he say? Did he want me to call back?”
Janet shakes her head. “He said he’ll call you.”
“See, Angela?” Grandma says. “When you play around, you may miss something important.”
Tofu, Miso, and Nori
I move into my mother’s old room the next day. Grandma Michi used the room as storage space for her crafts, as if the 1001-cranes room was not enough.
The Singer sewing machine, shaped like a horse saddle, is still in the room, pushed into the corner. But the bolts of fabric and the bags of yarn have been relocated.
There are a matching dresser and vanity set, along with the bed frame, made of pressed wood and painted white. The edges are scalloped, fake French, which is perhaps the worst kind of fake. My mother must have felt the same way, because she has trashed it with stickers of peace signs, the Budweiser man in a cape, a multicolored Peter Max cloud, and a bloodred STP oil logo.
I search the empty drawers of the vanity, trying to find any scraps of paper, any indication of who my mother was at my age. I discover a stack of blue ribbons for excellence in a number of talents—running, even gardening. Underneath the ribbons is something hard. A book—no, a diary. It has a cheap lock, and no key is to be found. I rip the flimsy flap that is supposed to ensure the privacy of the diary’s contents.
It is one of those daily diaries; 1968 is written on the front page.
My fingers peel apart the pages. Blank. But then, on July 18, there is this sentence: I went to the store today and saw him.
Who is ‘him’? I wonder. I leaf through all the other pages. Empty. So I’ve gone to the trouble of destroying Mom’s diary lock for this single line?
On top of the vanity, stuck in the corners of the mirror, are a couple of faded photos. They’re group shots of some Asian girls. I can spot my mother immediately, even though her hair is down to her butt, and her eyebrows are plucked severely in the form of upside-down Vs. She is laughing—they all are—and I wonder if that was the last time my mother felt carefree.
I unpack the clothes from my duffel bag and put them into the dresser drawers. It seems strange that my clothes are in the same place hers were when she was my age.
Half an hour later, I step outside. Janet is on the porch, three kittens of different colors around her feet. “Tofu,” she says, pointing to the white one. “Miso,” the brown. “Nori,” the black.
“I didn’t know you had cats.” I sit next to Janet and pick up Nori. I like black cats.
“They’re not mine. They’re stray. Dad is allergic to them. And Mom doesn’t like them.”
She then kneels down and pulls out an old pie tin from the crawl space underneath the house. There are small bits of cat food smeared in it. “Shhh—it’s our secret,” Aunt Janet says.
I smile. I’m happy to hold on to a good secret for once.
“Look, Nori likes you.” Aunt Janet points to the black cat, which has curled up in the crook of my arm.
“You know,” Aunt Janet says, rubbing Miso’s nose, “I think your dad will call you today.”
I get a phone call at dinner. We are eating spaghetti with ground beef; Gramps has rice with his noodles.
I race to pick up the receiver. It’s a familiar voice. My mother’s.
“Hi, how’s everything?” Her nose sounds stuffed up.
“Okay,” I say. “What’s wrong with your voice?”
“Allergies. Maybe it was from the smog down there.” Mom tries to laugh, but it sounds fake.
“Where are you?”
“Home.”
I wait to hear some signs that my dad is in the house as well. A television sportscast in the background, maybe the clanging of plates and pans in the kitchen. But nothing.
“Have you made any friends?” my mother asks.
“No,” I say, trying to push the skateboarder’s face from my mind. “I’ve barely been here. Anyway, I’m surrounded by old people,” I whisper.
“Now stop complaining. Have you gotten any customers yet?”
“No. I’m still trying to learn how to fold these things. Grandma Michi even grades my cranes.”
That piece of news doesn’t seem to faze my mother. “Well, if all goes well, Mom told me that she’s going to give you half the money for every display you work on. A hundred and fifty dollars each. Some college kids don’t even make that much for a week’s worth of work.”
My mother is good at distractions, but I’m not going to let her get away with it this time. “I haven’t spoken to Dad yet. He has my cell phone number, doesn’t he?”
Silence. “Angie.” I can barely hear my mother’s voice. She clears her throat. “Angie,” she says again, more loudly. “Your father has moved out.”
I feel as though I’m falling backward into a dark hole. The world is spinning. It shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. My nose starts to run. Somehow, this feels different from last time. Like this is going to be forever.
“Angie, are you there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Can I come back home now?”
“I need you to stay with Grandma and Gramps.”
“For how long?”
“I’m not sure. There are some issues I’m dealing with.”
“Issues? What kind of issues?”
“I can’t say right now, Angie.” Her tone gets flat; her momentary softness is gone.
I really start to cry now and Grandma gets up from the table and takes the phone from me.
“An-jay,” Gramps calls, but I ignore him and run outside.
I hope to see the kittens wandering around. But they’re gone. Instead, there’s the next-door lady, Mrs. O, kneeling by her trash can.
I turn away for a moment and wipe my face with the front of my T-shirt. I know that I look awful. When I cry, my eyelids swell up. It probably wouldn’t be a big deal if I had hakujin eyes, but I have Asian eyes. Slightly double eyelids that expand four times when wet with tears. Not a pretty sight.
I stare at Mrs. O for a minute and then gingerly walk toward her. I smell something putrid. Vomit. I can’t make out much on the lawn, but spy a milky liquid on some blades of grass.
She finally notices that I am there, watching her.
“Oh,” she says, mopping up tears with the backs of her hands. She is wearing a lot of mascara, so there are black smudges all over her face now.
I turn to get my grandparents, and I guess she reads my mind.
“Don’t do that. I’m all right.” She slowly gets up. “It must have been something I ate.”
That doesn’t make any sense. There are bathrooms for that.
“Hey, Mom, you okay?” A white woman comes out of the house. She has brown hair that is cut at her chin and she is wearing a dress and heels. She must be a little younger than my mother, but her fashion style makes her seem older.
“Yes, yes.” Mrs. O wipes her face again and quickly makes introductions. “This is the Inuis’ granddaughter. Angela, right? My daughter-in-law Sarah.”
I am surprised that she has remembered my name, and before I know it, the old woman has quickly escaped back into the house, leaving me with the daughter-in-law.
“Ah, well—nice to meet you.” Sarah sniffs and frowns. “What’s that smell?”
“Some of the stray cats,” I say. “They got sick, I guess.”
The daughter-in-law sticks her tongue out; it is tiny and pink, like the kittens’. Then she retreats into her in-laws’ house.
I don’t know why I said what I said. I don’t like this Mrs. O or her husband, Jack—wasn’t that what I told both Gramps and Grandma? As I pull out Gramps and Grandma’s garden hose and aim water at the offensive barf, I can’t help imagining Mrs. O and me together, standing in the same muck as those cows in Kettleman City.
MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 3: Fold with a sense of purpose and confidence. If you hesitate, you will most likely end up with a broken line.
The Great Gambaru
Tonight I go to bed early. Early-early, at eight o’clock.
I am sticky and my eyes are swollen, but I don’t bother to take a bath, wash my face, or even brush my teeth. And no one tells me I have to. Either they feel sorry for me or they are afraid.
Around nine o’clock, somebody knocks on the door. I don’t answer, but the door opens slowly. Gramps. He sits on the edge of the bed. I can tell that he’s putting most of his weight on his feet and legs, because the bed hardly sags.
“You’re going to be all right, An-jay,” he says, and I start crying again. I don’t know if it’s because he said “all right” or his nickname for me. Or maybe it’s a combination of both.
“Nothing is ever going to be right, Gramps.” My eyes feel as big as clamshells. “She won’t even tell me everything that’s going on.”
Gramps doesn’t say anything for a while. He rests his hands on his legs as if he’s deep in thought. “You know, I once felt that my world was falling apart.”
I can’t imagine Gramps ever feeling depressed or sad.
“I was a little older than you. I was hoping to go to college. But the war came and we had to move out of our house and be locked up in a camp. The schools were rotten in camp. I was mad. Real mad.
“Then my boss at the mess hall sat me down and had a talk with me. The first heart-to-heart talk I ever really had with a grown man. Even my own father never talked to me. Like my dad, my boss was from Japan and couldn’t speak English that well. But one thing he taught me was gambaru.”
“Gam-ba-roo?” I ask. It sounds like “kangaroo,” and I almost start to laugh.
“Your parents never talked to you about gambaru?”
I shake my head.
“‘Gambaru’ means ‘to persevere.’ To hang in there. When everything looks bleak and rough, to charge ahead anyway.” Gramps pauses and I hear a weird knocking sound from his mouth. I know that it’s from his false teeth. When I was ten, I nearly died when I saw Gramps’s dentures floating in a glass of water in the bathroom. I’ve since gotten used to it. Gramps is still Gramps even without
his real teeth. “Do you know what I’m saying, An-jay?”
I don’t answer. I don’t even nod. I don’t want to let what he’s saying soak in, because it would mean I would have to change. And that’s the last thing I want to do.
He turns and pats the top of my head, the crazy hair that’s sticking out on top of my pillow. There’s the flower smell again. “You’ll be all right. You’re tough. You’re like your mother, who’s like your grandma.”
I can’t imagine that I’m anything like either of them.
“I know you feel that everything’s been taken away from you. But you’ll get things back. It just won’t be quite like before. But it’ll still be good. Now, you sleep.”
Dreaming Dad
When I wake up the next day, my eyelids are quadruple-size. King-size. Supersize. I look like I’ve been stung by a bunch of killer bees.
I go to the kitchen to get some ice cubes to reduce the swelling. Grandma’s already there, washing some dishes.
“You now have your first one-thousand-and-one-cranes project,” she tells me. She looks at me face to face and doesn’t even acknowledge that my eyes are swollen shut. “Next door.”
“They’re married already.”
“It’s their wedding anniversary. Their fortieth. They came over this morning. Mrs. Oyama specifically asked for you to oversee the folding.”
“Me?”
“They want the family to be involved. The two hakujin daughters-in-law will be folding the cranes. You’ll be training them.”
“Can’t you just give them your booklet?”
Grandma doesn’t say anything and puts a dried plate away. I know that if Gramps was around, he would comment, “They’re hakujin. What do they know?”
“How about you? Aunt Janet?”
“I guess you made quite an impression on Mrs. Oyama.” Grandma dries the prongs of a fork with her dish towel. “They’ve invited you for dinner tomorrow to discuss the particulars.”
It is decided. I can’t argue. I spend the rest of the day icing my eyes and reading a manga that I brought with me. Nobody bothers me. Aunt Janet makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, covers it with a napkin, and leaves it on the dining room table.
1001 Cranes Page 4