In science class, we talk about tectonic plates and fault lines.
“I get that there are deeply buried places where one plate meets another and all this pressure builds up,” I say to Ms. Belsky, our teacher. “And they might slip in our lifetime or not. But what I don’t get is why the world has to be so sketchy. Couldn’t we all have managed just fine without fault lines?”
Everyone laughs, but the thing is, I’m not joking. They should have put me on the Committee. I’d have designed a world without earthquakes. And while I was at it, without volcanoes, floods, tornadoes, droughts. Why couldn’t the Earth just be one big, smooth round ball, turning forever and ever in harmony with the heavens?
My parents send me to a shrink. Which is a pretty major thing to do in Japan, where usually people who go to shrinks are considered to have lost it. I figure with my parents it’s a transference thing, like when you’re mad at someone so you kick the dog. Instead of going to therapy themselves, they’re sending me.
“I’m basically fine,” I tell the shrink, a sixtyish Japanese woman who keeps doing watch checks she thinks I don’t notice.
She nods. “I imagine things have been quite stressful for you?”
What a genius. “Nothing really happened to us here in Tokyo. It’s the people in Tohoku who have it bad.”
“Do you feel guilty in some way about that?”
“I don’t know.” I should just say yes. Then she’ll think she’s figured out my problem and we can wrap this up.
The conversation lags, so I tell her about some research I’ve been doing, that plate tectonics came from continental drift theory, which is about how places like Africa and South America once fit together but then drifted apart.
She says some stuff about trying to relax, letting things take their course, blah, blah, blah.
If this is what they teach you in psychiatry school, I can start seeing clients next week.
Everything seems really pointless and I feel like crying, but I don’t say anything else and neither does she. We sit for a while without talking, a Japanese thing that normally drives me crazy, but today it’s nice to just look at the plum trees in the garden.
When I get home, my dad’s gone somewhere and my mom’s in her study off the kitchen. I never see them together anymore, like in this Spanish movie my parents and I watched once where it’s the Spanish Civil War and the mom and dad don’t get along so they’re never on screen at the same time.
“How did it go, Katydid?” my mom asks, taking off her reading glasses. Her desk usually looks like a hurricane hit it but now everything’s perfectly straight: a row of sharpened pencils, a stapler and ruler; a silver Eiffel Tower paperweight she bought one morning from a souvenir shop by the Seine.
“Okay,” I say, a small happiness flitting through me—she only uses my pet name when she’s in a good mood. “The therapist told me that I shouldn’t keep things inside. That I should tell people what’s going on.”
“Well, she’s right.” But she doesn’t say anything else, just looks at me with this faraway expression. “Did you put your lunch bag by the sink when you came in?”
“Yes. Quit asking me, okay?” I’m so sick of her tidiness campaign—if it’s not my lunch bag, it’s putting away my clothes or straightening the books on my shelf. Yesterday, she even made me brush Momo’s teeth. But I’m also a little worried: you hear about people with OCD who just flip out.
I sit on the floor and rest the back of my head against her knees. “Mom? Is everything okay with you and Dad?”
“What is this, the Inquisition?” she says teasingly, mimicking what I say to her when she asks about my personal life. Then she sighs and tilts my chin up toward her. “Your father and I are . . . just going through a bit of a difficult time. Nothing for you to worry about, baby.”
Which sounds totally lame, like: Don’t worry, we’ve just hit a bit of an iceberg.
Her cell phone rings and she digs it out of her pocket, squints at the caller ID. “I’ve got to take this, okay?”
I know who it is: the guy from the supermarket. I stand up to leave because now she’s going to want some privacy, but she says, “No, stay. I’ll just be a minute.”
She answers the call and I realize I was totally wrong—it’s someone from her office. And I wonder if there are other things I might be wrong about.
While she’s talking, I look at the papers on her desk: she’s editing the English version of a script for a bilingual documentary about adventurers. In the part she’s working on, there’s an interview with the author of a book about Edmund Hillary, who with a Sherpa climber named Tenzing Norgay was the first to reach the top of Everest.
“Looks like an interesting show, don’t you think?” my mother says after she finishes her call. “It’s important to attempt something big in life.”
“Maybe, but think about all the people who don’t make it. What’s the point if you end up dying of altitude sickness or being swept away in an avalanche?”
She smiles. “Well, I’ll tell you, one thing I’m learning from all this earthquake stuff is that there are no guarantees. Things happen that we don’t always have control over. But even though they do, we have to keep trying, right? Whether it’s climbing Everest or anything else.”
There’s something I don’t exactly get about what she’s saying, like when you look directly at an object in the dark and can’t see it, but if you look just to the side of it, you can.
It comes to me that evening. Even though I still don’t feel like running, I lace up my shoes before dinner and force myself to go. I walk for a few minutes, break into a slow jog, and then I’m on my way, energy starting to flow through my body. A new moon is rising over the canal, the houses and apartment buildings, the old wooden shrine next to the neighborhood park, just like in the books I loved when I was little, stories of towns where everyone lived happily ever after. I stop to ring the shrine bell and wake the gods so they can hear my prayer: Please help the people in Tohoku. Please let my parents stay together. And then I keep on running—through the park, past shops and restaurants, up a steep street of more houses and apartments. As my feet pound the earth, I think about adventurers walking along paths, crossing ice fields, sailing ocean routes to new worlds. My mom’s right: even though you don’t always know what’s going to happen, or why, you have to keep going. And I guess it’s like that with lots of things, including earthquakes and marriages.
When I reach the top of the street, I stop to catch my breath. The cold spring air is sharp in my nostrils and the lights of the dim city spread out below like a quilt of fireflies. Maybe, just maybe, the universe isn’t designed so badly after all. Maybe it had to be designed the way it is because if there weren’t any obstacles in our path, we’d be like . . . rocks or plants, with no chance of becoming anything more than what we already are. I mean, it’s this chance that makes us human. Rocks can’t push themselves to become better rocks; plants can’t decide not to give up on themselves or other people.
When I get back to the house, my mom’s study light is on but the room is empty. On her desk is a legal pad covered with my dad’s scrawl. I’m surprised to see it’s an evacuation plan for the three of us (four including Momo): if necessary, we’ll go to my grandparents’ place in Okinawa, or if we have to leave Japan, we’ll go see my other grandparents in San Francisco.
As I climb the stairs, I hear voices from the veranda. I tiptoe toward the sliding door in my parents’ bedroom and see two figures on a blanket: my mother, with her head on someone’s lap. It’s the guy from the supermarket. No—edging closer, I see it’s my father. He and my mother are looking up at the sky, Momo at their feet. I step outside and they don’t say anything, just shift position so I can sit between them, then put their arms around me. And now I notice there are all these leaves on the veranda—my mom didn’t sweep today—and I realize something was different about her study tonight: The desk was a mess. A wonderful mess! Especially with my dad’s family evacua
tion plan sitting right there in the middle of it all.
An aftershock rattles the house and we jump. But amazingly, my dad doesn’t shout at me to get under a table and my mom doesn’t run for the earthquake kit. When the house stops shaking, we sit quietly, looking at the stars, and then we talk a little, my dad asking how school’s going, my mom telling a funny story about a colleague. We stay out on the veranda for a long time, all of us together on this beautiful night.
Friends and Enemies
Bad Day for Baseball
by Graham Salisbury
Someone’s hand was on my shoulder. I was dreaming of clinging to the mast of a boat in a storm with lots of thunder. The sounds were so real.
I peeked open an eye.
“Tomio,” Mama said. “Telephone.”
I bolted up and fumbled for the clock. Not even eight o’clock yet. Jeez. Scared me. I thought I was late. I flopped back down and rubbed my eyes. I could sleep another hour. The game was at ten.
My brown and white mixed-breed mutt, Zippy, jumped up on my bed and licked my face. I shoved him away, but he thought it was a game and grabbed my wrist in his teeth. “Jeez, dog, you got bad breath.”
“It’s Butchie,” Mama said. “He said get up and come to the phone. It’s important.”
“What’s all that noise?”
“Army or something. Maneuvers. I don’t know.”
“It’s loud.”
“Come on. Get up. Daddy’s outside watching the planes.”
“What planes?”
“The army. Come on, Butchie’s waiting.”
Butchie was my cousin, and two years older than me. We were like brothers. Me, him, and Zippy went everywhere together. I stumbled out to the phone in the kitchen. “What?” I said.
“Get dressed. I’m coming to get you. And don’t bring that mutt.”
“What are you talking about? I can’t go anywhere. I got a game today. And anyway, why I can’t bring Zippy?”
“I telling you, he can’t go where we’re going.”
“Where we going?”
“Just get dressed. Hurry it up.”
“But—”
“Wear your Rotsie uniform if you got one. You got one?” He said Rotsie, not the letters ROTC. Anyway, what was he talking about, ROTC?
“Only the shirt. Why?”
“Put it on if that’s all you got. But hurry. This is an emergency. I’m not kidding, Tomio. Don’t you see all that smoke?”
“Wait,” I said.
I glanced out the window. The sky was pockmarked with small dirty black clouds. Mama was right. It was maneuvers. But probably navy, since it was so close to Honolulu harbor. “Yeah, but that’s just—”
“No, no, no. I telling you, Tomio, this is for real. The Japanese are bombing us. The radio said for all Rotsie guys go UH, now! So get ready. I’m coming to get you.”
“But Butchie—”
He hung up.
I peeked out at the dirty clouds one more time, then ran into my room and dug up my Rotsie shirt. I tore off my T-shirt and put it on, all wrinkled up like a rag.
“I gotta go somewhere, Mama,” I said, hurrying back out to the kitchen. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her what was happening. Anyway, I wasn’t sure Butchie wasn’t joking. “Where’s Daddy now?”
Mama pointed toward the front room window with her chin. Out on the street Daddy was standing with his hands on his hips, eyes to the sky. Mits Yumoto was standing next to him, also looking up.
Zippy was leaping at the door, ready to go. He knows when I’m going to leave, every time. “You gotta stay home this time, Zip. Sorry.”
I opened the door a crack and squeezed out.
Zippy started scratching the back of the door like crazy. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
“Come on, Zip. Shhhh! I be back soon. No worry.”
I stuck my fingers under the door so he could smell me one last time, his paws scraping the floor. I hated leaving him. He always went with me. I could carry him on Butchie’s putt-putt like always. But Butchie said no.
“Daddy, what’s going on?”
Daddy kept on staring at the sky.
Mr. Yumoto turned to look at me. He didn’t smile.
Daddy said, “I never seen the army make it look so real. They even painted the planes to look like Japanese.”
There were planes all over the place, circling, diving, shooting, and roaring back up. “It’s not the army, Daddy. It’s real. Butchie just called. Those really are Japanese planes. He said they bombing us. Can’t you hear it?”
Daddy turned and frowned at me. He didn’t say anything. I think he already figured it out but didn’t want to believe it.
“I gotta go with Butchie. They calling for Rotsie guys to go UH. He’s coming over now. Where’s Leonard?” I asked Mr. Yumoto.
“Fishing. Down the harbor. He went early this morning.”
Leonard was his son. He was first year at UH, and also he was in ROTC. “You gotta tell him the army wants all Rotsie guys to go to the university.”
Mr. Yumoto nodded and left. Two minutes later Butchie zoomed up on his smoky putt-putt motorbike. The explosions were getting louder now, and the sky was dirtier, and it wasn’t just from the small smokes. Now there were huge stacks of black clouds boiling up from somewhere on the other side of downtown. How could it be real? It was impossible. Japan was too far away. But I could see them with my own eyes, hundreds of fighters with red suns on the wings. And they were bombing us.
Daddy looked back up, frozen where he stood.
“He thinks it’s maneuvers,” I whispered to Butchie.
“Hurry up. Get on. We gotta go.”
I slid on the back and grabbed hold of the belt loops on Butchie’s khaki uniform pants.
“Uncle,” Butchie said, calling to Daddy.
Butchie’s father and mine are brothers.
Daddy didn’t move, stiff as a pipe.
The smoke filling the sky was looking bad, real bad.
Butchie shrugged, gunned it, and buzzed out of there.
As we drove to a higher elevation you could see the smoke billowing up from Pearl Harbor, ugly fat black funnels of it with giant red flames spurting out at the bottom. More people flowed out into the streets. Some stayed in their yards, and a few even climbed up on top of their cars, everyone watching the planes circling around Pearl Harbor.
There was an explosion on the hillside near us, and I knew then that the navy was shooting back now. And missing. People scattered back into their cars and houses.
Me and Butchie leaned forward on the putt-putt. I peeked around him, the wind making me squint. He had the motorbike on all out.
“What we going do?” I yelled above the whining engine.
“Just what the radio said,” he shouted back. “They just want us at UH. That’s all I know.”
“But I’m only high school Rotsie.”
“Yeah, but Rotsie is Rotsie, right? Anyway, it don’t matter. Nobody cares right now. This is an emergency.”
We roared uphill, higher and higher, past Roosevelt High School and across to Punahou, where we turned and took a shortcut through the rich houses in Manoa. It was spooky seeing those big homes like that, all peaceful with every kind of flower you can think of growing in the yards when the sky was filled with warplanes and ugly black smoke. Even up here people stood on their porches looking up. Through the plate glass windows behind them I could see big mirrors and paintings on the walls, and vases stuffed with flowers.
I held tight onto Butchie. His uniform was clean and pressed sharp as brand-new. Mine was a mess. At least it wasn’t dirty. I had on my Rotsie shirt, some old pants with no belt, and nothing on my feet.
At the university there were guys all over, hurrying down from cars and bikes parked any which way under the trees and on the grass. We got off and leaned the putt-putt against a tree, and jogged down to the football field where everyone was assembling. Looked like there were hundreds of us.
&nb
sp; Five real army guys with grim faces were quickly inserting firing pins into the old Springfield rifles. They handed them out with live ammunition.
“Hey you!” One guy called. “Over here!”
Me and Butchie ran over. The guy threw us rifles and four clips of bullets each. He didn’t even ask who I was or if I even knew how to use the rifle. Which I didn’t.
I looked at the Springfield.
“Here,” Butchie said, showing me his. “That’s where the clip goes. And this is the safety. You can’t use the rifle with the safety on. But don’t take it off until you need to shoot.”
I fumbled with the clips, stuffing three in my pocket. I dropped the other one in the dirt, picked it up and blew off the dust, then managed to cram it in place. Forget the safety. I didn’t want to touch it. What was I supposed to shoot, anyway? The planes?
They were gone now, I noticed. I couldn’t hear the engines anymore.
When everyone had rifles and bullets the top army guy told us to line up. I was only five feet tall, the shortest guy there. The rifle was almost as big as me. And it was heavy.
“Listen up,” the army guy said. His nameplate read Capt. Smith. “We are under attack. We don’t know what will come next. Anything can happen. We’ve received word that paratroopers have landed in the mountains and are working their way down. They’re somewhere up there.”
He turned and swept his hand toward the jagged ridgeline above St. Louis Heights. My stomach suddenly knotted up, like a fist closing. This was getting too real. A sour taste rose in my throat. I felt like I was going to throw up.
“We’re going to keep them from advancing. Understand? That’s our job. Is that clear?”
Tomo Page 5