She puts her hand on Isa’s cheek, wipes off makeup, then rubs it between her fingers as if it were a strange kind of dust. “It’s my first day,” Isa says, but my mother takes her apron to Isa’s face. “What will people say about you, when they see you like this? Would you do this back home?” She asks more questions, tells Isa that just because we’re in Lemoore doesn’t mean she can look like any girl on the street, and she’s wiping makeup from Isa’s face the whole time, until nothing is left. When my mother is done, she steps backwards, leans against the sink. “Go to school,” she tells us. She doesn’t walk us to the door. She doesn’t say goodbye.
We walk out of the house, down the driveway, and out of the cul-de-sac. The sun fades as the fog ahead thickens, and our windbreakers don’t keep us warm. “Walk faster,” Darwin says, blowing on his hands and rubbing them together. We lose him a block later—his school is in another direction—and when he leaves, he just shrugs and says bye, his teeth still chattering. Isa and I go on, holding hands even more tightly now.
Kids crowd the front steps of my school. Isa leads us through the building, down a hallway to my classroom. The door is barely open. We go in. We find rows of empty desks, blank chalkboards, and no teacher in sight. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here.”
“No,” Isa says, double-checking the room number, “this is right.” She bends down to fix my collar, promises that everything about this day will be fine, then looks at the clock above the chalkboard beside the American flag. I look too, thinking about the distance between Lemoore and San Quinez, how here it’s today and there it’s tomorrow, but the arms of the clock don’t move, not at all. I don’t know how to tell time, but I understand that Isa is late and not ready for today. Her windbreaker looks like a plastic trash bag on her body, her face is smeary and gray.
The bell rings. Isa leaves. Kids come running in and around me to their desks, and finally the teacher appears with a stickpin between her fingers. “Wear this,” she tells me, pinning a name tag shaped like an apple onto my shirt, then leads me to the front of the class. She stands behind me with her hands tight on my shoulders, telling everyone how far I have traveled, and how lucky we are to be together. Then I tell them what my father told us all to say on our first day: “I am very happy to be here.” Two girls giggle and won’t stop, and when the teacher asks what’s so funny, one says that I said bery instead of very. So I repeat myself, and now I hear it too. Bery. Bery. Back home, my English was perfect; here, I can’t get it right. I don’t speak the rest of the day.
After school, I watch a janitor sweep the hallway while I wait for Isa outside my classroom. When she arrives, she says nothing, doesn’t even ask me how I am, or how my day has been. “Let’s go home” is all she says, then turns, exits the school. She stays ahead of me the entire way, her legs so long and fast that I can’t keep up, and when I almost do, I catch glimpses of her face, her teary forward stare. Why do you cry, Isa? I want to ask. Did they laugh at you, too? But before I can get a question out, I fall behind again. Half a block separates us by the time we reach our street, and when I’m finally home, Isa is already in her room, door closed and the radio blaring. In the living room, Darwin is lying on the floor in front of the TV, and in the kitchen my mother is staring at a boiling pot, her arms folded over her chest. When I tell them I’m home, they barely nod. So I go back to the garage and crawl into the box, practicing the word very over and over until evening, and time for us to eat.
The next day is not much different. All through class I’m silent, and I spend recess lining up pebbles along the bottom of the playground fence. What saves me from tears is knowing that the school day will end, and that Isa will come for me.
Some better days are ahead. Like those afternoons when Isa picks me up wearing school-spirit chains around her neck, or the time she wandered into a picture on the front page of the school newspaper. Once, I even catch her writing Isa, Class of ’75 on the palm of her hand, as if she has always been and will always be a part of them. But when school is over, the autograph pages in her yearbook are empty and white. No one wished her a happy summer, or good luck for the following year. And though her name is listed in the index, my sister is nowhere in the book.
Early June. Summer vacation, and the days drag. Isa is always lying on her bed listening to the radio, and the thump of Darwin’s basketball is like the ticking of a slow-moving clock. I spend my time by the living room window, watching kids bicycle and roller-skate by, chasing each other down with water pistols. Once, two kids walking a wolf-faced dog stop in front of our house, and just as I’m about to wave, they shout, “Vietnamese people eat dogs!” so I yell back, “We’re not Vietnamese people!” then shut the window and draw the curtains.
Then something happens: one night at dinner, Isa announces that she’s been hired as a cashier at Lanes, the diner inside the Naval Station bowling alley. “It’s summertime,” she says, “maybe I should work.” My mother says no, but my father says (quietly, like he’s embarrassed), “We need the money,” and he allows Isa to take the job on one condition: Darwin and I must accompany her each day, and stay with her until my father comes for us in the evening. “A girl shouldn’t be out there alone,” he says. But Isa insists she’ll be fine on her own, that nothing is dangerous in Lemoore. “Please let me have this,” she says. When no one answers, she goes to the window above the sink, slides it open. “Tell me what’s out there. Tell me what to be afraid of.” She looks like she might cry.
My father tells Isa to take her seat and finish her dinner. Isa sits, arms folded across her chest. I put my hand on Isa’s to comfort her, but now I’m wondering: When did she go to the bowling alley? Did she tell me she was leaving, but somehow I forgot?
“Let go,” Isa says to me.
The morning Isa starts her job, I find her in the bathroom, trying on her uniform, a mustard-colored bowling shirt with matching slacks, and orange shoes that fail to give her the height she’d hoped for. She checks herself in the mirror, moving her shoulders forward, then back, shifting her waist to the right, to the left. “What do you think,” she asks me. “Do I look like Cheryl Tiegs?”
“You look like Nora Aunor.” Darwin laughs, walking by the bathroom. “You look like Vilma Santos.” He goes on with a list of the corniest Filipina actresses, and Isa gets so mad she douses him with a Dixie cup full of bright blue toilet water. “Immigrant bitch!” he shouts.
“American bitch,” I correct him.
Isa bends down, puts her hand on my cheek, and says, “I love you.”
After breakfast, my father drops us off at the bowling alley. Before Isa can get out of the car, he grabs hold of her wrist. “This is a good opportunity for you,” he tells her, “so work hard, and be good. And you two”—he looks at Darwin and me—“watch your sister.” But as soon as my father drives off, three boys approach on bikes, and Darwin high-fives each one. They’re friends from his school and he goes off with them, tells us he’ll be back when my father picks us up in the afternoon. “Have fun being bored,” he says. Every day after, he leaves us.
So from the beginning, I am the watcher of Isa and this is what I do: each morning when we arrive, I take a corner booth and watch her ring up meals and wipe tabletops and counters, all day long. I know she wishes I weren’t there, so I stay quiet and still as I can, but after a week, I’m a problem. “He’s here again,” Isa’s boss says. “Why is he always here?” Isa moves her arm in fast circles as she wipes off a nearby table, as if she is trying to come up with a story for me. I give her one. “Our mother is dead!” I shout this out to make sure Isa’s boss hears me. “No one is home to take care of me!” Isa looks up. I try winking at her but instead I blink, and suddenly tears I didn’t plan come streaming.
“I’m sorry,” he says, patting Isa on the shoulder. “Sorry.” That day, he tells Isa to keep all the money in the tip jar, and says I can eat all the corn dogs and Eskimo Pies I want.
We never talk about the lie. Once it’s out, I can’t tak
e it back. And why should I? My mother takes good care of us—food is always on the table, our clothes are always clean—but the rest of the time she’s sitting in her room, reading and rereading letters that make her weep. When we come home, she never asks how we are, or how we’ve been, and when I ask about her day, she just says, “You were gone. I was alone.”
It’s better here with Isa. She smiles for me at least, like when she spells my name in ketchup over a basket of fries, or when old ladies call her “dear” and remark on her beauty and good English. One day Isa tells a customer, “Thank you for coming to Lanes,” and she sounds so pleased and finally fulfilled with our life in Lemoore that I need to hear it again. So I run out into the bowling alley to the pay phone by the bathroom, drop a dime, and call the diner.
Isa picks up. “Thank you for calling Lanes,” she says.
I whisper, “It’s me.” I can see her but she can’t see me, even as I wave. “It’s me,” I say again.
“Who?”
We have never spoken on the phone before—we have never been apart—and now I sound like a stranger. “Hello?” she says, turning side to side, as though the person on the other end is somehow with her in the room.
Before she asks who I am again, I hang up and go back, running.
Bowling-alley days get longer, I keep watching Isa, and nothing happens. So, little by little, I start to leave. At first I stick close by the diner door, watching off-duty soldiers bowl, and I cheer their strikes and laugh at their gutter balls. Then I walk my fingers along the racks of bowling balls, looking for ones I can lift. I start to go farther: without coins I go to the arcade and pretend to play pinball, or finish abandoned games of air hockey. I like to push buttons and pull knobs on the vending machines, hoping that gum or a bag of chips will fall for free, and one day a roll of Life Savers actually does. I snatch it, look around to check if anyone saw, then run back to the diner to tell Isa about my incredible luck and share my candy with her. But when I get to the diner, Isa isn’t at the register or standing behind the counter. Instead, she’s in a booth by the jukebox, sitting across from someone, a boy her age, a boy with long white arms full of freckles and the reddest hair I have ever seen.
I press my hands and face against the glass door. I watch. They’re just talking, that’s all, but he’s holding a cigarette, and when he reaches to move a strand of hair from Isa’s face, she flinches, just a little. He keeps his hand there, even as the cigarette burns. I haven’t seen anyone touch my sister’s face since my mother, months before, the morning we started school.
His name is Malcolm and he’s always here. He bowls all morning in the very last lane, then visits Isa at noon, stays until we have to leave. He never brings flowers and they never kiss, but, once, they disappear. Returning from the arcade, I find a note taped to the cash register that says BACK IN TEN MINUTES. But I don’t know how long ten minutes is, and despite the clock above the jukebox I still don’t know how to tell time. So I go running out the diner, to the arcade, the women’s bathroom, then the diner again, and when there is still no sign of Isa, I run out into the parking lot, up and down the rows of cars. The daylight is so bright I can barely see, and every direction I go in is wrong. But finally I find her, sitting on the rear bumper of a sky blue van, right next to Malcolm. A cigarette burns between her fingers.
I point at her to make her understand: You were gone! I couldn’t find you! but I’m crying too hard and can’t catch my breath. She takes my hand and pulls me close, kisses my cheeks, my nose, the top of my head. “Watch,” she says. She takes the cigarette to her lips, closes her eyes like she’s gathering courage, and exhales a wave of smoke. “See?” She opens her eyes. I breathe her smoke through my nose, and when it makes me sneeze, Isa starts laughing, Malcolm too, and now so do I. “More,” I say, and now Isa is making smoke rings, a thing I’ve never seen, and I try to break them with my finger before they float away and vanish.
Who knew a person could form circles from smoke? Or cry and laugh at the same time? This is a day of learning new things: I look at Isa looking at me, and I think we are amazing.
Later, when my father picks us up, I tell him, “Nothing happened today,” then get into the backseat with Isa, put my head on her lap. I watch her staring out the window, and when she looks down at me, she smiles and sighs, like her longing has ended, and we have finally arrived in the place we were meant to be.
Middle of August. Eight months in America, and Isa will be seventeen. The year before, the whole village celebrated her birthday, and in her white, floor-length dress, Isa looked like a bride. This year, we celebrate at the new Pizza Hut on base, and give small gifts: she gets pink fuzzy slippers from my parents, nothing from Darwin, and an egg-carton caterpillar I made in school, from me. “Next year you’ll get more,” my father says, almost whispering, and just as I’m about to sing “Happy Birthday,” my mother shushes me. “People will stare at us,” she says. When I try again, Isa takes my hand. “You’ll sing to me later,” she says. But I never do.
The one who makes her birthday matter is Malcolm. The next day at the diner, he tells Isa he wants to take her out for her birthday, someplace far away from here. “Hanford,” he says, “maybe Fresno. Anywhere but Lemoore.” He takes the saltshaker and taps grains onto the table. “Goddamn Lemoore.”
Isa puts her hand on his wrist, right in front of me. “But Lemoore means love,” she says. “In French.” Then she says “love” all the other ways she knows—koigokoro, beminnen, mahal—and Malcolm lights a cigarette, nodding with every word.
That night at dinner, Isa says her boss needs her for a Friday-night late shift and will pay her double, maybe triple, even drive her home afterward. She says the late shift might lead to a promotion, maybe a raise, but my mother says no. “A girl out at night,” she says, doom and threat in her voice.
“Then I’ll be with her,” I say. I tell my parents how much Isa’s boss adores me, how I remind him of his son. “But that boy died. A car crash,” I say. “He was crossing the street. A van came …” The story is even better than we rehearsed it, and as I lie I’m picturing Isa in a car at night with the window rolled down, her ponytail like a ribbon in the wind, singing to any song the radio plays, and finally, because a dead child fills them with pity, my parents tell us yes, we can go, just this once. “Thank you,” Isa says to them, but she’s really thanking me. Beneath the table I squeeze her hand to tell her, You’re welcome.
Everything is perfect. Darwin has come down with a fever and won’t be coming with us. My mother still refuses to leave the house at night, and insists my father stay with her. “We’ll be okay,” I tell my parents throughout the day. “We take care of each other.” They believe whatever I say.
Just before dark, my father drives us to the bowling alley. Before we get out, he makes us kiss him goodbye on the cheek, which we’ve never done the other times he drops us off. He drives away, and I imagine myself in his rearview mirror, shrinking and shrinking as he travels down the road. I’m still waving even after he’s gone.
Isa hurries inside to change in the bathroom. I stay where I am. Then, as if he’d been watching, Malcolm pulls up in his van. He doesn’t say hello, doesn’t invite me in. He just sits there smoking a cigarette, then flicks it out the passenger window. I watch it glowing on the ground until Isa steps out and takes my hand.
“Let’s get him home,” Malcolm says. He reaches over and opens the passenger door. The backseat is crammed with boxes and crates, album sleeves, parts of a bike, so I sit in front on Isa’s lap. She goes over the plan once more, making sure I remember every step. Her arms are wrapped around my chest and I lean back, my head resting against her shoulder. She’s shivering and her knee bounces a little, like a mother trying to calm the wailing baby in her arms. “I’ll be fine,” I whisper, and Isa says, “I know.”
Off we go. Malcolm takes a different route home, and every turn becomes a street I don’t know. When we finally reach the end of our block, the fog is so
thick I almost don’t recognize that this is where we live.
Malcolm pulls over. Isa and I step out. “Count eleven houses,” she says, pointing toward home, “and you’ll be there.” She pulls my hood over my head, tugs at the drawstrings, and as she knots them together she tells me to be brave, though she is the one who cries. Then she tells me that she loves me, and that’s the most important thing, the only thing.
She kisses my cheek, then steps back, climbs into the van. I let them leave first, watching the red taillights of Malcolm’s van until they disappear into the fog, and that’s when I see it, for the very first time: my breath in the air. It floats before my eyes like a tiny ghost, and I’m so amazed that I must stand still, marveling at the fact that I possess the power to project something from deep inside me into the night air. I breathe again, watching my breath and remembering the smoke rings Isa made, and I think we are exactly the same.
I start toward home, counting off houses. I walk up someone’s driveway, and though the garage is padlocked shut, I tug at the handle anyway, as though it might open. Then I run a zigzag line from house to house, breathing hard so my breath floats in the air again, and no one ever sees me. I’ve never been outside by myself like this, so late at night in Lemoore. I’m so brave that I even walk in the middle of the street and shout, just once, “Hello!”
I stop at the bottom of our driveway. The living room window glows blue and I move toward it slowly, staying low. I stick close to the wall, peeking in. Darwin is on the floor wrapped in a blanket, my father dozes on his recliner, my mother leans against the doorway of the kitchen. Even as I move to the center of the window, they still think I’m gone.
My breath fogs the glass. It’s cold. I leave my family and hurry over to the side of the garage, find the key and flashlight we hid behind the trash cans, and let myself in, make my way quietly and slowly to my box. I crawl inside. In the corner is a pack of crayons and two foil-wrapped corn dogs from Lanes, a thermos of juice, and the roll of Life Savers that fell for free. Next to it is Isa’s watch. She’ll be home by 2 A.M., when she’ll come into the garage, get me from the box, and together we will enter the house, as if we were never apart. I look at the watch. I see the 2, but I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. I don’t even know the time now.
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