1001 Cranes

by Naomi Hirahara

  Wet Carnations

  The next few days are filled with folding, folding, and more folding. Origami cranes as big as the Dumbos on the Disneyland ride even show up in my dreams. They fly past my head one after another. When I wake up, my fingers are moving above me, folding invisible cranes.

  Gramps has told me that during dark times, it’s good to keep your mind on other things. I think that’s definitely true for Grandma Michi, because she’s constantly moving. She doesn’t watch much TV or many movies, and when she does, she’s either knitting or clipping coupons. She doesn’t talk about her dark times, but she wears them on her face sometimes when she doesn’t think people are looking.

  Origami is my medicine for right now. The cranes are my distractions and I’m grateful for them. Now most of them go into the A pile, or at least the B pile. I make Cs when I start thinking about Mom and Dad.

  Mom and Dad take turns calling me, so I figure that they talked to make sure at least one of them would touch base with me every day.

  On Sunday afternoon I try not to think about the skateboarders—well, one certain skateboarder—at the middle school. He probably forgot about me, I figure.

  On Monday morning I get up early to go to the flower market with Gramps. He goes to the flower market three times a week. He tells me that they are actually two flower markets that stand opposite each other in downtown Los Angeles, but most people think they’re just one. The one on the west side of Wall Street is the “American” market, and the one on the east is “Japanese.” We go into the Japanese one.

  When I first heard of the flower market, I thought of a book I had read that took place in England during Victorian times. There was a drawing of an open-air market, with women with big breasts, wearing gauzy peasant dresses and flower wreaths in their hair, carrying baskets of daisies and roses. But the reality is completely different. The flower market is encased in concrete, surrounded by tents and refrigerator boxes where homeless men and women live, and run-down diners. We park our van in a paved lot and Gramps borrows a flat cart on rollers from a black man named Johnny. Johnny seems to be a good friend of Gramps’s. “You have a mighty pretty granddaughter there,” he says, and he looks at me hard, as if he means it.

  Gramps seems to know everyone who works in the flower market. We go down in the elevator to a big open area filled with plastic containers of every kind of flower you can think of. There are stands throughout the room and Gramps tells me that he has “standing orders” with the best growers and wholesalers. At least half of the workers here are Japanese and have funny names like Jibo, Mamo, Itch, Taxie, Haruo, and Froggy. They smile at me and offer me flower bouquets wrapped in newspaper. “Next time you come, we’ll buy you some breakfast at the coffee shop,” they tell me.

  “I like the flower market,” I tell him on the way home. His van is full of buckets sloshing with water and blooms.

  “What’s not to like?”

  When we arrive at the flower shop, somebody all dressed in white is sitting at the front door. The girl, Rachel Joseph. She gets up immediately when she sees Gramps’s van, but her face falls when she realizes it’s me, not Grandma Michi, in the passenger seat.

  Gramps parks in the back, next to the tool shack, and starts to unload the flowers from the van. Rachel rounds the back corner of the shop.

  “Where’s Auntie Michi?”

  Since Gramps doesn’t acknowledge her, I feel that I have to say something. “She’s at home working on a last-minute display,” I say. I figure that she will leave now, but she remains in front of me, pulling at her orange belt.

  “Well, do you know when she’ll be coming back?”

  Oh my God, what a pest. Emilie complains about her little sister and brother, but I never took her that seriously before. I shrug, thinking that now Rachel will go for sure, but instead, she runs to the back of the open van, picks up a plastic container full of pink carnations, and begins to follow Gramps into the shop.

  “Hey.” I pull at the container. The water sloshes and drips onto my Vans. “You’re not supposed to do that.”

  Rachel has opened the back screen door and positions one leg inside the shop, one leg outside on the welcome mat. I don’t know what an orange belt means, but I have to admit that she’s strong for her size. “I help Uncle Nick all the time,” she says. Her grip remains strong around the container’s handle.

  Now, I don’t know why, but this little girl is making me mad. This is my Gramps. My Grandma Michi. Not hers. I know it sounds stupid—I mean, I’m old enough to know better and I’m not sure how much I even like my grandmother—but I feel that I have to fight or I won’t have anything left anymore.

  “Leave it.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “No.”

  My fingers are getting red from tugging so hard on the container’s handle. “I’m not kidding,” I warn her.

  “Me either.”

  “Listen, why don’t you go back to your own family?”

  Something I’ve said works, and Rachel releases her grip. The container falls onto the welcome mat, soaking it and part of Rachel’s gi. The screen door snaps closed, breaking the stems of the carnations.

  “See? See what you’ve done!”

  Rachel’s brown eyes are filled with tears. First I think she’s just mad or spiteful. But I soon realize that she’s scared.

  I feel totally bad now. And ashamed. Before I can say anything else, Rachel has run out of the parking lot.

  “What happened here?” Gramps asks.

  “Uh—I—”

  Gramps kneels down and picks up the heads of the broken carnations. “Ah, not to worry. I can use these for the boutonnieres for the Lopez wedding.”

  Tony

  After we unload, I go back inside the shop and try not to think of Rachel Joseph. I mean, she was just getting in the way, right? She didn’t have any business being at the flower shop. Grandma said that I should be nice to her, but I wasn’t that mean to her, was I?

  I eat a bologna sandwich at the shop counter. I fold probably twenty C cranes before Gramps reminds me to get ready to walk to the Buddhist temple. Grandma has drawn a map for me, plus I skateboarded there that one time, so I know exactly where it is. I want to take my skateboard this time, too, but Gramps says it’s a bit unprofessional. Besides, he tells me, I have to carry the sample design, all plotted out on graph paper, and the swatch of glued cranes.

  He puts those items into a manila envelope for me and I wave to him before I leave.

  I turn the corner at the liquor store, and a skateboarder squeals to a stop, almost crashing into the left side of my body. I don’t know if it’s because he surprises me or because it’s him—yes, the guy from the schoolyard—but I loosen my grip on the manila envelope. It slips through my hand, down a hole by the curb, and into the gutter.

  “No, no!” I scream loudly, and I almost don’t even care that I’m embarrassing myself in front of him.

  The boy obviously has fast reflexes, because before I’m finished screaming, he’s down on the pavement, his cheek pressed against the ground, to try to retrieve my package for Kawaguchi. He desperately waves his hand toward the sad manila envelope, which is soaked in gunk and surrounded by trash in the gutter. But his arm is not long enough.

  I cover my face. “I can’t believe it. What am I going to tell Gramps?” I say, but I’m really wondering what I’m going to tell Grandma Michi.

  “What’s in there?” The boy stands and brushes dirt from his jeans. He misses something dark on his left cheek, but I say nothing about that.

  “Oh.” I sit against the wall of the liquor store building. “It’s really hard to explain.”

  “I have time,” he says, kneeling down beside me.

  “I make these cranes,” I say.

  “You mean the origami kind?”

  “You know about them?”

  “I’ve made some before.”

  It seems that the boy can easily read my
face. “Boys can do origami, too.” He smiles and I notice that one side of his mouth goes up a little higher than the other.

  “Anyway, my grandparents have a business to sell these one-thousand-and-one-cranes displays for weddings and things like that. That’s why I’m here—to help them.”

  “That’s cool. So that’s origami down there.” The boy points to the gutter.

  I nod. “It was a sample, only about twenty silver cranes. And a diagram of the design on graph paper. I’m supposed to meet her—” I fish my cell phone out of my pocket. “Crap. In ten minutes.”

  “Just call your grandparents. Tell them what happened.”

  “You don’t know my grandma. She’s going to be pissed. She’s going to tell my mom, and my mom’s going to be pissed. Everyone’s pissed right now. My mom hates my dad, my dad’s left, and everything’s all messed up.” I don’t mention anything about yelling at Rachel Joseph, but that’s on my mind, too. Everything comes out so fast I don’t realize that I’ve violated my family’s rule about not sharing secrets with outsiders.

  “That sucks,” he says. And for some reason, those two simple words make me start to cry. I’m really not a crybaby, I want to tell him. But the fact that I’m crying will make that sound stupid. My nose starts to run and I’m horrified. I wipe away my snot with the side of my index finger, but there’s still more, like lines of a spiderweb.

  “Here,” he says, pulling his sleeve toward me. “Use this.”

  “I don’t want to mess up your shirt.”

  “Use it. I’ve had worse things on my clothes.”

  I duck my head toward his arm. His skin is nice and tan, like a perfectly roasted marshmallow. I gingerly take the bottom of his sleeve and lightly brush the tip of my nose with it. His sleeve smells like burnt leaves and sweat. I like the scent.

  “Thanks,” I say, and I mean it. Not just anyone would let a perfect stranger wipe her nose on his clothes. “Now what am I going to do?”

  He gets up and offers his hand to me. He helps me stand and says, “I’m Tony, by the way.”

  “I’m Angie,” I say back.

  “I know.” He smiles again. “I think I can help you.” He leads me around the corner and into the liquor store I stopped at a couple of Sundays ago to buy gummy worms. He waves to the elderly man behind the counter. “That’s my uncle Carlos,” he explains, leading me past rows of potato chips and refrigerated drinks.

  We go into a back room that’s dark and musty-smelling. He tells me to sit down at a Formica table and then he leaves for a moment. He returns with a package of graph paper and a roll of aluminum foil.

  “Do you think you can remember what that design looks like?” he asks.

  Tony says that he loves to draw and wants to be a cartoonist someday. I tell him that I want to be a writer of manga books, and he jokes that we should collaborate. I draw the star on one corner of the graph paper and he works fast to replicate it on the entire sheet. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to fold cranes with squares of aluminum foil. It’s not going to work that well, but I do so anyway.

  I don’t even check the time because we’re working as fast as we can. Before we know it, we’re finished. I’ve taped the malformed cranes to a piece of cardboard and he has graphed Kawaguchi’s family crest. I’m surprised, because his drawing looks almost as good as Aunt Janet’s. For a moment I think that I can pull it off.

  Tony borrows his uncle’s bicycle, an old three-speed with a dorky basket on the front of it. Before we leave, I tell him about the dirt on his face. “You have something here,” I say, pointing to my cheek.

  He rubs his face but he misses. “Where?”

  I brush the dirt away with the tips of my fingers. His face feels warm, like he’s been out in the sun.

  He holds the bicycle still so I can sit on the handles with my thighs hanging over the basket. Tony has put our designs in a backpack for safekeeping. When we arrive at the Buddhist temple, he steadies the bicycle so I can get off. He’s strong, much stronger than he looks. He unzips his backpack and it smells like cigarette smoke. He then hands me the crane-taped cardboard and the graph paper.

  “Thanks,” I say. I cannot believe how nice he’s been.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  I shake my head. There’s already enough explaining I have to do. How would I explain Tony?

  “Come to the school this Sunday.” He presses down on my wrist, and my arm begins to tingle.

  I make no promises, but I know that nothing will keep me away from him on Sunday.

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 4: Be careful about the edges and the corners of your origami. Those are the places that are the most visible.

  Broken Butsudan

  For some reason, when I’m nervous or doing PE, I don’t sweat where most people do. All my sweat goes through my body and lands on my nose and my upper lip. Like right now in front of the Buddhist temple. Salty drips run down the middle of my face onto my T-shirt. I know that they are salty because some of my sweat lands on my lips and goes into my mouth.

  I hesitate a moment in front of the gate and then open it before running up the concrete stairs. Once I reach the temple building, I almost crash into a man wearing a polo shirt and shorts.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I tell him. He’s Japanese American, with skinny eyes and big, thick tree-trunk arms. “I need to find Mrs.—I mean Ms. Kawaguchi. She has a meeting here.”

  “You look like you’ve been running in a 5K.” The man laughs. “I don’t think she’s here yet, but you can wait for her in the sanctuary.”

  I beat Kawaguchi? I could have spent more time gluing the cranes! There isn’t anything I can do about it now, though.

  I walk down a hallway with the man.

  “Are you her niece?”

  “Oh, no,” I say, maybe a little too emphatically. I made it sound like being her niece would be horrible. Well, actually, it might. But I wasn’t trying to make Kawaguchi out to be evil. Really.

  “I’m here to deliver this.”

  The man frowns at the wilted cardboard and the taped aluminum foil origami cranes.

  “I know that it looks kind of bad. Had an accident.” Maybe it’s all Tony’s fault, but words begin to spill out of my mouth again, like sludge from a sewer pipe. The man listens as I tell him about Kawaguchi, the envelope in the sewer, and how Grandma Michi doesn’t think I can do much right.

  “So Ms. Kawaguchi is a tough customer?”

  “She’s kind of mean,” I whisper. I’m surprised that I’ve said such a thing to a stranger but it just came out.

  “Just go through that door.” He gestures to a narrow hallway.

  I speed up the stairs into a giant hall. No one is in there, only empty rows of wooden pews and a huge altar in front of the room, which smells of incense. The altar looks like a giant black wardrobe open to reveal shiny gold ornaments and Japanese writing. I’ve seen this kind of altar before. I know that it’s called a butsudan.

  When Jii-chan’s brother, Uncle Tai, died, the family had the funeral in a Buddhist church on the other side of San Francisco Bay. I hadn’t known Uncle Tai that well. I’d seen him only once a year, at Thanksgiving. There was no coffin at his funeral. Only an old picture of him in a fancy frame. We had to go up in front of the butsudan, where there were containers of incense that looked like ash, and sprinkle that incense into a larger pot of burning incense. My mother told me that I should bow before and after I did the incense thing, but I forgot. I hoped that no one was watching me.

  It turned out that Uncle Tai’s wife, Auntie Momo, was staring at me from the front pew. She looked so sad, and when I passed by, she clutched at my elbow as if she was trying to cheer me up. I felt bad, because I couldn’t remember much about Uncle Tai. He’d sat on a couch with the other old people and eaten his Thanksgiving turkey on a TV tray in the back room of the house my dad had grown up in. I don’t think I ever really had a conversation with him, other than nodding when he asked me if I was doi
ng okay at school.

  I start to feel like I have to pee, or go shi-shi, as Gramps calls it. But I hold it in. I’m glad that I’ve stayed, because a few minutes later Kawaguchi enters, wearing a new suit and the same pearls. Holding on to her Day-Timer, she’s frowning. I bet she’s the crabbiest bride around.

  “Where’s the wedding coordinator?” she asks me.

  I shrug. I don’t know if she’s talking about the man who brought me to the sanctuary.

  “What’s that?” She points to my aluminum-foil cranes.

  I reluctantly hand over Tony’s drawing and the taped cranes.

  “What is this made of? Tinfoil?”

  More sweat drips from my nose to the tile floor. I feel like my body is getting swirled up into a dark tornado.

  Before anything more happens, an older woman with a pad of paper appears from the back door. “Hello, Ms. Kawaguchi,” she says, and I instantly know that I’m safe. At least for a few more minutes.

  You wait, Kawaguchi mouths, and I sink into one of the front pews.

  “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. Your fiancé couldn’t make it?”

  “He’s in Europe right now. On a business trip.”

  “Well, how wonderful. Unfortunately, I have a piece of bad news to report. Our minister is having health problems.”

  The color seems to be draining from Kawaguchi’s face. “Health problems?”

  “Yes, a stroke.”

  “This is awful. This is just awful.” Kawaguchi hugs her Day-Timer to her chest as if she’s trying to console it.

  The wedding coordinator nods. “I know it’s just such a shock, but I’m sure Sensei will recover.”

  “By my wedding date?”

  The coordinator’s mouth falls into a straight line. Even I know that it is pretty low-class to say something like that when somebody’s sick.

  “It’s just that my parents got married by Reverend Nako,” Kawaguchi says, trying to explain herself. “It would have been so perfect. We were even going to tell the photographer to pose us with the minister in the same exact way.”