That made him smile and seemed to settle him down.
“It’s a real pleasure meeting you both,” he said. “I truly enjoy these visits with you. But I am sorry that I am meeting you under these conditions. These are difficult times, but I hope that you get through them all right. I’ll say a prayer for you.” He seemed very relaxed about being on the ground as he spoke. But it made me nervous. What if he got caught out of his tower? My original fear of him was transformed into fear for him.
“I think you’d better get back up in your tower,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”
“You’re right. I’d better go before someone sees me,” he said. “But I’m glad I had this opportunity to shake your hand. Being in the guard tower is a boring job. You two have made it all worthwhile. I hope you continue to come by.”
We watched him climb up to his perch. Then we left.
We didn’t return to see Arky the following day, because Haruko was absent from the activities class. And I wasn’t going to go see Arky alone. The singing group was preparing for a recital and my afternoons were filled with rehearsals after that.
A few days later, my cousin Jean came over with the latest news. “Have you heard?” she said. “We’re all going to be shipped to Arkansas!”
“Arkansas? Arkansas! That’s where Arky’s from!”
“Who’s Arky?” asked Jean.
“Oh, no one. Just someone Haruko and I met. I’ve got to go, Jean. I’ll talk to you later,” I said and left her standing in front of our apartment. I ran to Haruko’s.
CHAPTER 11
“Once in a While”
FRANK SINATRA
“Hey, Haruko. Where’ve you been? I’ve missed you.”
“I was sick,” she said.
“Are you okay now?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, have you heard? We’re going to Arkansas. Let’s go tell Arky.”
“Wait. You’re going to Arkansas? We’re going to Arizona!” Haruko said. “I can’t stand it! We won’t be in the same camp!” She began to cry. I tried to comfort her.
“You’ll meet a bunch of new people. You probably won’t even remember me after a while. . . .” Haruko was new to this. It was clear she had never moved before.
“I won’t forget you, Marie! Never in a million years!”
“Let’s go see Arky, anyway!” I said. “C’mon. He’ll probably be glad to see us.”
As we crossed the cool green lawn and approached the tower, we could see that the guard in it was taller. Arky was no longer there.
“Stand back! You girls shouldn’t be here!” shouted the guard.
“Where’s Arky?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear me? Get away from here!” he shouted. “Go play somewhere else! This is a restricted area!”
“Arky must have gotten into trouble for talking to us,” I said. “We were responsible. We shouldn’t have talked him into coming down to talk to us,” I said as we walked away.
“Yeah. Someone must have seen him come down. I hope he’s all right,” she said. “Or maybe he’s just been assigned to another guard tower. We could go look for him,” she added with a smile and a bounce. “Let’s do that!”
“That sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Let’s go!”
We walked along the perimeter of the camp, but never found him.
* * *
I awoke the following morning, but didn’t have the energy to pull myself out of bed. It was as though the strength in my muscles had been drained out of me during the night. It was an effort to even talk. It had also turned cold and the sheets felt like ice. “Mama, can you get me another blanket,” I said.
“Another blanket?” Mama said in disbelief. “It must be 100 degrees in here!”
“Mama, I’m cold. I need another blanket,” I said.
She put her hand to my forehead. “You’re burning up!” She covered me, stuck a thermometer in my mouth and put a wet towel on my forehead.
After Mama took my temperature, I fell asleep. When I awoke, two strangers were peering down at me. One was a very pretty lady who wore a white coat over her dress. The other lady seemed timid and hung back. She wore a white uniform and cap. A nurse, I thought. The woman in the white coat smiled as she introduced herself. “My name is Dr. Suzuki, and this is Nurse Komura.” Then she turned to Mama, “What’s her temperature?’
“105. And she has the chills,” Mama said. Dr. Sato then unfastened my nightgown and looked at my chest.
“See how the rash covers her trunk?” she said to Nurse Komura. I strained to see what they were looking at. My chest was uneven and red like the back of a cooked Dungeness crab. Ugh.
“This is a classic case of German measles,” Dr. Suzuki announced with a smile, “Textbook . . .” She was clearly pleased. I wondered why she was so happy that I had German measles and what that had to do with books. But it was too much of an effort to ask. Then she turned to my parents.
“I’m afraid she’ll have to be quarantined. I want to make sure German measles doesn’t spread throughout the barrack. I’m particularly concerned about Mrs. Sato next door because she’s pregnant. We’ll have to put your daughter in the hospital.”
I drifted into sleep again after the two left and was awakened by two men lifting me onto a cot with wheels. Then I was placed in the olive green ambulance with a huge red cross painted in a white circle. It took me to the camp hospital.
I was placed in the isolation ward, which was an enormous room with empty cots and one other patient. Only people with the German measles were placed there. The emptiness of the ward indicated that quarantine was working, the nurse said. The other patient was a boy I had never seen before. I was puzzled. It seemed logical that my roommate would be someone I knew. But the nurse told me that the incubation period was longer than the stay in the hospital, so the person from whom I caught it would have already gone home.
It was the only time I had ever spent even one night away from my family. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so alone. Added to the loneliness, I felt like I was sinking into a huge space and there was nothing to hang onto. My dreams were invaded by enormous white, towering blobs that leered down at me. I tried to escape from them, but there was no place to go. When I awoke my eyes burned, so I had to keep them closed. Then I’d fall asleep and the monsters would return.
My parents came to see me every day. That’s all they were able to do. See me, that is. They had to peer at me through a small diamond-shaped window cut in the door close to my bed. I never saw Brian, because children were not permitted to visit.
A couple of days into quarantine, the nurse brought me two cars my father had carved out of wood. They smelled strongly of fresh paint. One was black and the other red. Each was about a foot long, flat, sleek, and round. They were plain without movable parts, but Papa must have spent hours carving, sanding, and painting them. Beautiful. But . . . cars? I think he had me confused with his other child. What was I supposed to do with cars? I didn’t want to hurt Papa’s feelings, so I cradled the hard, smelly objects like they were dolls, whenever the nurse warned me that Papa and Mama were coming to see me. The rest of the time I left them on the table between my roommate and me. They became a conversation piece for my otherwise non-talkative companion. He tried to guess what model and year they were.
“I think they’re cars of the future,” he concluded. “They’re more modern than anything I’ve ever seen. Anyway, that was really nice of your father to go through all that trouble to make them for you. Can I hold them?”
“Sure,” I said.
The day before my release the nurse took them away.
“They’re covered with your German measles germs, so we have to sterilize them,” she said.
When she returned them to me, they were warped, crinkly, and sticky. Papa came to pick me up. He took one disgusted look at them and said they were ruined and threw them away in a trash can on our way out of the hospital. I shouldn’t have cra
dled them, I thought. Then they wouldn’t have needed sterilization. I felt badly.
Papa looked at me and said, “Don’t feel sad, Marie. I can make you new ones when we get to Arkansas.” Then he squatted in front of me and told me to climb on his back.
“I can walk,” I said.
“No, you can’t. It’s a long way and you’re still weak,” he said sternly. He became my ambulance home.
“We’re leaving for Arkansas this afternoon after lunch,” he told me in gasps, as we cut across the race track toward our barrack. I wasn’t very big, but neither was he. It was clear it wasn’t easy for him to carry on a conversation and carry me. “You don’t have to talk, Papa,” I said.
“We’ve all been packing and cleaning up, so you just need to take it easy until we leave,” he continued as though he hadn’t heard me.
Finally, we reached our barrack. We spotted Mama cradling a bundle of catalogs, boxes, and other odds and ends, on her way to the trash bin.
“Oh, there you are. That was a long way from the hospital. You both must be tired,” she said. “You should go lie down. I’ll join you quickly. This is the last of the trash. . . .”
Papa gave me a final boost and headed toward the apartment. Suddenly I remembered. Oh, No! My coat!
“Papa, where’s my coat?” I straightened my legs to release my grip around his waist and scrambled down. Papa almost fell as a result of my sudden dismounting.
“What?”
“My coat! Where’s my coat!” Without waiting for his answer, I dashed to our apartment.
It was not at all as I had left it to go to the hospital. The windows were bare and the cots stripped of linen and blankets. The beds had been transformed into a pile about as high as the benches in the mess hall. They were stacked, thin, legless frames layered with the thin mattresses and topped by Brian, lying spreadeagle like a squashed spider. The table and chairs were gone. In their place was the wooden container that had held most of our belongings when we arrived. Suitcases stood on either side like sentries. The room looked much as it did when we first got here.
“What happened to it?” I shouted. “Did it get thrown out?”
“You talking about your coat?”
“What else would I be talking about!”
“It’s right there where I put it,” said Brian as he got up and walked toward the hook on the wall just inside the door. I turned, and there it was. I pulled it down and clutched it to my chest.
“Thank you, Thank you, Brian. You’re such a great brother!” As I started to move toward him, one arm cradling my coat, the other outstretched, he staggered backward, wheeled around, and bolted out the door.
“Where’s Brian going in such a hurry?” asked Mama who was just outside the door with Papa.
“I think he thought I’d hug him,” I replied.
“What? Oh, I see you found your coat. Brian made sure it didn’t get left behind. Don’t forget to thank him.”
“I’ll give him a big hug!”
“When Brian gets back, have him bring the brown suitcase outside.” said Papa as he lifted one end of the wooden box filled with our belongings. He motioned to Mama to pick up the other end and they trudged out the door.
I slipped my coat on as I slowly took one last look around at what had become home for the past five months. Amazing what one can get used to. What next? I wondered.
CHAPTER 12
“Chattanooga Choo Choo”
GLENN MILLER AND HIS ORCHESTRA
For my first train trip, I had always imagined that I would enter a magnificent train station. Beautifully dressed people would be rushing across gleaming marble floors, their sounds bouncing against walls that soared to unreachable ceilings. Like I’d seen in the movies. In the distance, trains would be signaling their arrival with wailing whistles, followed by the gentle ringing of their engine bells as they glided into the station. Departing trains would rumble and grumble as their engines labored to move stubborn cars seemingly stuck to the tracks. Stationary trains would have sleek, streamlined cars flanked by courteous, uniformed porters, who would smile and extend a hand to help me board.
But today, there were no marble walls or floors. No trains coming and going. No courteous porters. This one-track train station was without floors, ceiling, or walls. We stood outside in the hot mid-day sun in a treeless, open field. There, among a chaotic jumble of people, suitcases, bundles, boxes, and armed soldiers, we waited to be transported to some unknown place deep inside of our own country. We would board an old, paint-faded wooden thing of a train car that looked like it had been dragged out of a junkyard. I felt embarrassed even to get onto it and hoped that no one would see me riding in it.
Instead of porters helping us, soldiers stood guard at the train steps, with blank expressions and rifles with pointed bayonets at their sides. Another soldier, armed with a clipboard, called out family names.
I wore my favorite “princess” coat. The beige, double-breasted, hooded wool coat trimmed with dark brown velvet that my parents had bought for me two days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It was the coat I wore into Stockton Assembly Center, and now I was wearing it to Arkansas. It was a little cooler now, but this was a particularly hot Indian summer day. I pulled the hood over my head to protect it from the sun directly above. The beads of perspiration that kept forming on my nose ran together and trickled into my mouth. I kept pulling my hood away from my head so that my dampening hair wouldn’t cling to the velvet lining. But I didn’t care as long as I was able to keep my coat.
Brian was carrying his trademark tennis ball in his right front pants pocket. That’s why the lines in his heavy corduroys bulged out.
“I need it to play catch when I run into friends,” he’d say if anyone asked. He also wore his gray wool zippered jacket with the square pattern of thin blue lines. The jacket barely covered his belt and its sleeves were a couple inches above his wrist, but it was the one he always wore.
Papa, in his three-piece suit, tie, and matching hat, stood out alongside other men who were in shirtsleeves or windbreakers. That was the only kind of clothing Papa owned. We were people from cold San Francisco traveling with people from the hot rural towns outside Stockton. My mother wore her brown wool coat and brown hat with the curly duck feather.
Finally, it was our turn to board. I had to pull myself up onto the stool placed below the lower step of the train. From there I was able to grab the train’s handrail and climb up the steps onto the entry platform. After I turned and entered the car I was surprised to see what looked like maroon velvet upholstery peeking out from between the people moving up the narrow aisle and into their seats on either side. Maroon velvet? That was just like the soft comfortable seats in the Alhambra Theater in San Francisco! Grade A and grade B double-feature movies, Looney Tunes cartoons, cliffhanger serials, and Movietone news with pictures of the war in Europe and refugees boarding trains all appeared in my mind’s eye. . . .
“Marie!”
That was Mama’s voice. I turned and looked up to see where it was coming from. She was right behind me. “Pay attention!” she said as she nudged me down the narrow aisle with the suitcase she was carrying. As we moved, she brought her face close to my ear and explained that the soldier in charge said that every fourth seat had to remain empty for baggage.
Half of the seats had been pulled forward, like on streetcars, so that two seats faced each other forming a unit. For our family of four that meant one of us would have to sit with strangers. There was a young couple with no children in the unit in front of what was to be ours. My parents had decided that I should be the one to sit with them.
“I hope you don’t mind having Marie ride with you,” Mama said to the couple. Turning to me, she said, “Marie, this is Mr. and Mrs. Okamura.”
“Glad to meet you, Marie,” said Mrs. Okamura from her seat next to the window. “But don’t call me Mrs. Okamura. That makes me feel old. Please call me May. And call my husband Tom.”
�
��Okay.”
“Why don’t you sit next to the window so you’ll be across from me,” May said with a laugh and turned to Tom. “Move our suitcases, Honey,”
He leaned over and pulled them onto the aisle seat over a small mound that was all the padding left on the seat after years and years of pounding by many, many behinds. Not at all like the soft, beautiful Alhambra seats. The seating on the train had lost most of its color to the sun, most of its velvet hair to people brushing against it, and all of its softness to people sitting on it. That’s what May told me later.
“You’re blocking the aisle!” a loud voice boomed from behind us.
The soldier was glaring at our family and motioning wildly with his rifle to clear the aisle.
“You’d better sit down, Marie,” Mama said. “Be a good girl, now. Don’t give them any trouble.” Then she turned to May and Tom and bowed. “Thank you very much for letting her sit with you.”
Papa removed his hat and bowed.
“Thank you,” he said before he, my mother, and my brother moved on to their seats.
I quickly climbed over the Okamura’s bags and removed my coat. It felt good to take it off. There was a shallow shelf and a hook over the window for hats and coats, but I couldn’t reach them. Anyway, I wanted to keep my coat close to me. I folded it inside out so it wouldn’t get soiled and placed it carefully on their bags and sat down. I pulled my coat toward my face and rested my cheek against the smooth and silky, but slightly damp, lining and closed my eyes for a moment. It felt good. It also felt cool in the train after standing in the sun so long. But that wore off, and I began to notice that the air in the car smelled like damp, salty dust. We could use a little fresh air in here, I thought. I stood up and examined the window to see if I could figure out how to open it. I removed my shoes and started to climb up on the seat to see if there was a latch on the upper edge of the sash.
“You can open it now, but once we start moving, you’ll have to close it and draw the shades,” May said with a laugh.
The Little Exile Page 11