Different Days

by Vicki Berger Erwin

  Hula dancer, Rosie thought, and the small girls were imitating her every move.

  “I’m Iolana,” she said, still dancing. “We moved in last night. Do you by any chance babysit?”

  “For my brother,” Rosie said, not able to take her eyes off the dancer. Not only did she dance well, but she was also beautiful in an exotic way. Living on the beach brought something new every day. And this neighborhood was more “authentic” Hawaiian than anyplace she’d ever lived.

  “Is there any chance you’d want to earn some extra money by watching a few more kids?”

  Rosie knew they could use the extra money. “I should probably ask my aunt.”

  “Not every day,” the woman continued.

  “My mother used to run a kindergarten,” Rosie said, warming to the idea.

  “Then you are perfect!” Iolana said.

  “Rosie?” Aunt Etta called as she came up the sandy path to their house.

  “Over here! We have neighbors.”

  Iolana shooed the children off to play and reached inside the house and turned the record player down. “Your aunt?”

  Rosie nodded as Aunt Etta crossed the dirt lawn and joined them. She quickly introduced the two women.

  “I was trying to talk your niece into helping us out over here,” Iolana said. “I need some babysitting while I work.”

  “If Rosie wants to. At least until school starts again.” Aunt Etta looked at Rosie.

  “Okay,” Rosie agreed. “When do I start?” Maybe she could make enough money to buy a dress to wear when school did resume. And a bathing suit. She missed swimming but she had nothing to wear. Rosie promised to go over around nine a.m. the next day to watch Iolana’s two small girls.

  “I have a surprise for your birthday,” Etta said, as they walked back toward the house.

  “Food?” Rosie said. Please let it be food! “A cake?” She’d almost forgotten her birthday was coming up on Sunday. She figured there would be no presents and certainly no party.

  “No, no. Though I do have a few cheese sandwiches tonight. Mr. Peters gave them to me and I didn’t even have to sneak them off someone’s plate. I think he feels bad for paying me so little. And I have chips, too. They are kind of smushed up but they will taste the same. But that isn’t the surprise.” Aunt Etta faced Rosie and took her hands. “Your mother has been moved to Sand Island and that means we can go visit!”

  Rosie squeezed her aunt’s hands. “They won’t lie and say she isn’t there? We’ll truly see her?” Since Aunt Etta had returned, it had been easier to deal with missing Mama and Papa. But with the possibility she might see them soon, it flooded over her how much she wanted to.

  “Your mother,” Aunt Etta cautioned. “Your papa is still with the rest of the men on the mainland. I think they were near San Francisco but I’ve heard they are moving again.”

  “That’s really far,” said Rosie, her lower lip quivering.

  “Your mama will tell you all about it. Sunday. We are going on your birthday.”

  “And I have a new job to keep me busy until then,” Rosie said. She felt excitement plant itself in her stomach, but didn’t want to let it grow too big. There had been too many disappointments and letting herself get too excited only made the disappointment worse.

  “You are a good, good girl, you know it? I am very happy I don’t have to worry about you and Freddie so long as you’re in charge.”

  Rosie wondered what her aunt would think if she knew they had been spending time spying on Mr. Smith. In fact, she decided this might not be the time to tell her about what they had seen today or show her the quilt, with things going well for now. Aunt Etta hadn’t looked so happy since the last time George had stopped by. She was normally tense and worried these days, so Rosie decided to let her enjoy looking forward to their visit to Sand Island.

  Sand Island. It sounded lovely.

  Chapter 29

  “I worked last night and need to sleep awhile,” Iolana said when Rosie came over the next morning. She was still dressed in a flowered top and “grass” skirt and wore wilting leis around her neck. The leis smelled lovely despite their brown edges. “The girls will be happy to play outside and I’ll be up by lunchtime. My mother stays with them at night but she has to work, too.”

  “I’ll keep them quiet,” Rosie promised, smiling at the two small girls who looked remarkably alike sitting on the couch eating bread and jam.

  “Girls, listen to Rosie and behave!” Iolana said sternly as she disappeared into the back of the house.

  “Let’s finish your breakfast outside,” Rosie said. She didn’t want to mess up her first day and have the girls keep Iolana from sleeping. Although they hadn’t said a word yet.

  It didn’t take long for them to start talking and when they started, they didn’t stop. Once Rosie knew their names, she quickly discovered the rest of their story—they were twins, their dad was in the Navy, they loved the water, dancing, and make believe.

  The girls, Daisy and Merigold, were easy enough to watch. They had an entire repertoire of pretend games that only involved the two of them. Rosie sat on the steps and watched. She thought perhaps the next time she was needed she might bring a book or her quilt square along.

  “Hey, we all have flowery names,” Daisy said, seating herself on the step beside Rosie.

  “We do.”

  “Our mom likes flowers,” said Merigold. “When we have a house where we live by ourselves, we are going to have a flower garden.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Do you know how to hula?” Merigold asked.

  “I don’t,” said Rosie.

  “But you’re Hawaiian! All of us know how to hula,” said Daisy.

  Rosie lifted her dark hair off her neck. Hmm, mistaken again for Hawaiian. It had to be her deepening tan and the way she held her hair out of her face with braided ti leaves. She pushed away the feeling she was being disloyal to her German heritage and felt relieved it was so easy to deceive people. “Never learned,” Rosie said.

  “We can teach you! We are very good dancers!” Daisy pulled on Rosie’s hand.

  Maybe it was time to learn the hula. She and Freddie could have their own act—he could play ukulele and she would dance the hula.

  “Learn how to do some dance moves, then we will play a record. Mama says you can’t find good Hawaiian tunes on the radio,” said Daisy.

  The girls made it look so easy, but it took Rosie awhile to relax enough to let her body move freely.

  “Think about the breeze and how it moves through the trees,” said Daisy.

  “And how the fish swim through the water,” Merigold added.

  “And the waves meeting the sand,” Daisy said.

  Rosie remembered one of the songs she had heard the Palus play again and again, thought about what the girls had told her, and closed her eyes. Her body seemed to float.

  She heard applause and when Rosie opened her eyes, Iolana leaned against the doorway, wearing a silk robe tied tightly at the waist and smoking a cigarette. “Very nice,” she said, grinning, “if you want to earn some more money, you can come to the club with me and teach the soldiers to dance. Every single one of them wants to learn to hula.”

  “Your girls are good teachers!” said Rosie. “I didn’t think I could do it, but they kept giving me hints and now, well, I’m at least not embarrassed like I was at the very beginning.”

  “They are quite the little dancers.”

  “Rosie got better when we told her about the breeze and the fish and the waves,” said Daisy, who Rosie had noticed was always first to speak.

  Iolana smiled at her girls, then turned to Rosie. “It always feels awkward at first but you looked good.” She disappeared inside for a moment and then music drifted out of the house. “Listen to the music and let the notes carry your arms and your hips.” She swayed gently to the beat. “Go ahead. Try it. Don’t think about your body, think about the music.”

  Rosie closed her eyes again,
partly because she didn’t want to see the expressions on the faces of anyone who happened to be watching. She listened for a moment then swayed, added some arm movements, then moved her hips the way the girls had showed her. It was feeling better.

  She heard clapping again and opened her eyes. Kam was watching from her yard. She stopped mid-move. How embarrassing for him to show up now!

  “I came to give Freddie a surfing lesson. Heard there were good waves today,” he said.

  “Your boyfriend?” Iolana asked, grinning.

  “No, no!” Rosie said, feeling herself blush all over. “He’s a friend, teaching my brother to surf.”

  “He’s very cute,” teased Iolana. “You need to eat if you are going to surf all afternoon. Want to join us for lunch?”

  “I’m not surfing. Just Freddie. I’ve—I haven’t got—I outgrew my bathing suit and haven’t had a chance to buy a new one,” Rosie said quickly, wishing she didn’t have to lie.

  “A bathing suit? I have many. You can borrow one of them until you have a chance to shop. So, lunch?”

  Lunch? She and Freddie usually skipped lunch unless there was food left over from the night before. And there wasn’t a bite left for them today. But could she eat and leave Freddie out? And there was Kam, waiting for them.

  “Thanks, but …”

  “Call your brother to join us,” Iolana offered. “And you, surfer boy, come have a bite of lunch with us!” Iolana had such a kind look on her face, Rosie wondered if she knew how little they had to eat in their house. “It won’t be much,” the woman said, “just some bread and butter.”

  Rosie’s mouth watered. It didn’t take much these days.

  “I’ve already had lunch,” Kam said, joining them in front of Iolana’s house. He rested his surfboard against her porch. “But I’ll provide some musical entertainment.” He held up the ukulele.

  The twins each grabbed one of Kam’s arms and led him into the house, talking away.

  Rosie called Freddie away from his pals and they joined Kam, Iolana, and her twins at the kitchen table.

  “I am so happy to have such nice neighbors!” Iolana said. “Some of my friends haven’t been so lucky! There’s this one girl I know whose mother overheard her employer speaking with her husband in German, planning who knows what, and she turned them in to the FBI, said they were Nazis. I mean, everybody knows that Nazis speak German.” Iolana nodded to emphasize how she felt.

  Rosie hung her head. Nazis spoke German, but not everyone who spoke German was a Nazi.

  “But,” Iolana continued, “my friend also said that her mother ended up with her boss’s job. So who knows why she really turned her in.” She shrugged.

  Rosie stiffened. The story had a familiar ring to it. Malia had ended up with her mother’s business and their house. She fought the idea, but it was looking more likely that Malia could be the “who” that had reported on her parents.

  Freddie stood up. “Kam, are you still going to surf with me?”

  Kam also stood and nodded.

  “I should stay and help with the dishes,” Rosie offered, although she hoped that Iolana would refuse. She needed to get away. She wanted to write in her journal.

  “Oh, no! Thank you so much for taking good care of the girls. Practice your dancing and I’ll give you more pointers next time. I’ll teach you how to tell a story.” Iolana moved her arms as she sat at the table.

  “Thank you for the lunch,” said Rosie.

  “Thank you,” Freddie echoed.

  “But Kam didn’t play his ukulele,” said Merigold.

  “Next time. Teach Rosie a dance and I will play and she will dance,” he said.

  “Wait a minute. I promised to lend you a bathing suit.” Iolana disappeared into the back room and returned almost immediately, holding a navy blue one-piece suit by the strap. “I think this will fit.” Then, she pulled her purse off the kitchen cabinet and searched through it finally handing Rosie a dollar bill.

  Rosie tried to hand it back. “This is too much with lunch and the suit.”

  Iolana refused to take it. “Nothing is too much to make sure my girls are well cared for,” she said. “Like I said, I’m so glad to have good neighbors.”

  A dollar! Rosie stared at the crisp new bill. Across the back of it was printed HAWAII. Rosie had read how all the old paper money had to be turned in to the government and burned. That money was replaced with special war money. If the island was invaded, the government would declare the HAWAII money no good and the Japs would have no money to spend.

  “Hey,” said Kam, elbowing her gently in the side, “treats are on you.”

  “I will let you know when we need you again. And thanks again,” said Iolana.

  Rosie followed Kam and Freddie out of the house.

  “I’ll take your brother down to the beach while you change. Then, I’ll teach you both to ride the waves.” Kam grinned.

  Rosie felt exhausted—the new job, the money, what Iolana had said about people being encouraged to report Germans, Italians, and Japanese and her hint that some made the reports for their own benefit. She’d thought no matter how wrong it might be, the informers believed they had something real to report. Now she wasn’t so sure their motives—M-O-T-I-V-E-S—were always pure.

  Rosie looked out at the waves breaking on the beach. It had been so long since she’d had a good cleansing swim and maybe that was what she needed to clear her mind before she wrote anything in her journal. She nodded at Kam and turned toward the house as he and Freddie headed for the beach.

  The bathing suit fit fairly well and Rosie wrapped a towel around her before leaving the house. The sand felt particularly hot on her bare feet as she made her way through the opening in the barbed wire to the beach. Kam and Freddie were goofing off in the shallow water and waved when they saw her.

  When she was under the open sky of the beach, Rosie checked first that there were no planes overhead and then she listened to make sure she heard no sirens. When she was certain it was safe, she dropped the towel and ran quickly into the water. It felt even better than she’d imagined.

  Rosie spent the entire afternoon in the ocean with only short breaks on the sand. When Kam said he had to go or his auntie would be worried, she couldn’t believe how quickly the time had gone.

  Aunt Etta was already home when Rosie went inside. Freddie was telling her about the bread and butter lunch Iolana had served them. When Rosie joined them, he left to change his clothes.

  “You’ve been swimming,” Aunt Etta said.

  Rosie nodded. “Iolana, from next door, lent me this suit.”

  “I should have realized that you didn’t have one!” said her aunt. “Living here on the beach and you with no swimsuit. Iolana is turning out to be the best thing to happen around here in a while.”

  “You are the best thing to happen to us,” said Rosie, again so grateful to Aunt Etta for rescuing them from Aunt Yvonne.

  “I’m going to march with my company,” Freddie said as he ran out the door.

  Aunt Etta shook her head. “I hope this war doesn’t last long enough that he has to become a real soldier. Bad enough that George might have to go!”

  “George!”

  “Not yet. But the possibility is always there. Just as I may, for whatever reason, be sent back to the internment camp.”

  Aunt Etta leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes.

  “I have something to tell you and something to ask,” Rosie said. “I’ve been thinking about informers today.”

  Aunt Etta sighed.

  “Before you came to us the first time, the government men searching our house asked me about your photos hanging on the wall. I told them you took the pictures, the ones of Pearl Harbor and Germany. I didn’t mean to inform on you, but was that … could that …”

  Aunt Etta shook her head. “I don’t know why I was interned. Most of us didn’t know a reason why. It could have been the photos, although I’m sure the FBI knew about them way
before you told them. Also, I had been to Germany recently with George. Please don’t worry yourself that you had anything to do with me being interned.”

  If she knew why Aunt Etta had been interned, Rosie thought it would be easier not to worry about what she had said.

  “Then let me ask you something else.”

  Again, her aunt sighed.

  “You know how you said, well not just you said it, that sometimes people made reports to the FBI about Germans, and other …” Rosie had to hesitate a moment before saying the hated words, “enemy aliens or plain old enemies?”

  “That reporting didn’t start yesterday,” said Aunt Etta.

  “I know that. But my question is, what if the reporting person benefits if the German or Italian or Japanese are taken away? Like Malia. If she turned Mama and Papa in claiming it was because she heard them speak German, or because of Papa’s radios, it could have been more because she wanted them out of the way so she could have the kindergarten again.”

  “It could have happened that way,” Aunt Etta said, her eyes remaining closed. “But we will never know.”

  “But what if we report on Malia? Tell the government men that Malia was lying because she wanted the kindergarten for herself?” Rosie said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Aunt Etta, still not looking at Rosie.

  “Why not? She lied!” Rosie said, starting to get mad at Aunt Etta as well as Malia.

  Aunt Etta shook her head. “No one will listen. Darling, now it’s different days and no matter who says it, who they say it about, the government takes all the reports seriously.”

  “So anyone can say anything about anybody and that person will be interned?”

  “There are exceptions. I myself have been accused and interned. The officials wouldn’t take my word for anything. They think I’m a traitor.”

  Rosie watched tears roll down her aunt’s face.

  “But, but …” Rosie hesitated trying to form her words, “that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Don’t we have rights?”

  Aunt Etta shook her head again. “Martial law.”