Ultimately, he was able to get his way. They turned out to be “the most delicious succulent turkey anyone had ever eaten.” Everyone raved about it. It had red juice coursing through some of it, but no one minded. In the words of one person, “It was like a medium rare steak.” Papa was not bashful about taking the credit and sharing how he persuaded the chief cook to shorten the roasting time.
Two hours later, Papa’s hero status came to an end. Dozens of people got sick from having eaten the undercooked meat. There was a lot of heaving going on. Everywhere.
The following day, Mr. Ota, the chief cook, came to our apartment.
“Mr. Mitsui,” he said, “We are all simple country folk here in Block 8, and you are from the city. I think you should get a job in an office or something and leave the cooking to us simple country folk.” With those words, Papa was fired.
After that Papa refused to set foot in the mess hall.
That meant that Mama had to bring his meals home. My uncle had always brought their meals to his home to eat because of little Ray. And people who were sick had their meals in their apartments. Papa was neither a baby, nor sick, but no one complained about this special treatment.
Another effect of Papa and Mama not working was that our family no longer had any income whatsoever. Brian and I were entitled to a clothing allowance of $3 a month each, if at least one member of a family worked. No one worked, therefore, no clothing allowance, either.
One evening about a month later, Mama came running into our apartment after going to the bathroom.
“The kitchen is on fire!” she said. “I could see flames in the kitchen area!”
“Have you told Mr. Ota?” Papa asked.
“No, I thought you should do it . . . ,” Mama said.
Papa bolted out the door yelling, “Fire! Fire!” as he ran to Mr. Ota’s apartment a few yards from the kitchen. I ran outside and watched people pour out of the other apartments surrounding us.
“Where? Where’s the fire?” they shouted.
“The kitchen!” Someone yelled out of the darkness.
Mama ran after me and led me back into the apartment.
“Stay inside. You’ll get in the way!”
The fire was caught in time and there was very little damage. Papa was a hero. Particularly since the memory of the mess hall in Block 6 that had recently been destroyed by fire was fresh in everyone’s mind. The residents of that block were scattered to surrounding mess halls for their meals. Everyone in our block was happy to have been spared that inconvenience.
The following day, Mr. Ota, the chief cook, came to our apartment to personally thank Papa and asked if he would return to the kitchen. There was an opening for a pot washer.
“Actually, it was my wife that discovered the fire. You should offer the job to her,” he said. Mama took the job.
* * *
But as one problem was resolved another developed.
We shared our porch with a young couple, Ken and Masako Nakamura, and their two preschool children, Taro and Sumi. They were a Japanese-speaking family. Ken was a quiet man who always dressed in neatly ironed shirts and pants and polished shoes. He smiled a lot, but rarely said anything. He reminded me of Tom, my train mate. Ken’s wife, Masako, was six months pregnant, but was always in motion. If she wasn’t sweeping the porch and steps, she was scurrying around in their apartment with muffled footsteps.
“Since the children play on the floor, we always take our shoes off before entering,” Masako said. “So please remove your shoes, Marie.” It was a routine that everyone had to follow when visiting the Nakamuras, just as it was at my Uncle Ray’s. She was very meticulous and all that shoe polishing and ironing filled the spaces between child-rearing chores. Taro and Sumi were amazingly quiet, like their parents. Or maybe I never heard them over our own din. Brian and I spoke in shouts, when we were close enough to whisper. Papa and Mama seemed to argue more than ever. Brian and I had developed a strategy to bury Papa and Mama’s fighting and divert attention to ourselves. This we did automatically. It wasn’t anything we had planned. Papa and Mama would suddenly discover that they couldn’t hear themselves argue because of us. They would turn to us and Papa would say something like, “Keep your voices down! You’re disturbing the neighbors. I don’t know what’s happening to you kids. This camp life is ruining you.”
When we were back home in San Francisco, I hated when they argued, but I hated it here even more. Family arguments were no longer contained within the family. It was as though everyone had their ears to our walls. Lately, their fights were about what Papa was doing while Mama was working. He checked with administration each day about a job in Community Activities, but they were still organizing and not ready to hire him.
Papa spent most of his spare time visiting with Masako. Whenever she padded across the floor of her apartment and opened the screen door with a squeak, Papa would peek to see if she was carrying something. If she was, and she was, most of the time, he would be hot on her heels. Most of the time, she was on her way to the laundry room. He would offer to carry her load. And after she was done, he would, of course, carry her load back. He probably even did her wash, though I never checked. Sometimes I saw them just sitting and chatting.
Naturally, Papa and Masako’s friendship did not go unnoticed by others in the block. It seemed people had nothing better to do than gossip. The idle talk crept into Mama’s ears and set off an explosion.
“You’re the talk of the camp!”
“She’s pregnant. Since I’m not doing anything, helping her is the right thing to do.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be doing ‘nothing,’ if you got a job.”
“I’m waiting for the Community Activities job. You know that. It takes time for the administration to get it organized.”
“You should have taken this job as pot washer when the Block Manager came around. Yeah. You should be washing pots instead of me, instead of following that woman around like a lost puppy.”
“I’m just showing compassion! You should have some compassion for Masako, too.”
“I don’t recall your showing me much compassion when I was pregnant. I worked every day in the cleaners, and cooked and cleaned. I don’t remember much help with any of that. You weren’t even around when Brian was born. You were gallivanting with your actor brother from Japan on that tour. . . .”
Papa seemed not to hear what Mama was saying.
“You should be showing Masako some compassion, too. The least you could do is keep our half of the porch swept.”
“That woman is complaining about my not sweeping the porch? If the porch needs sweeping, you should sweep it!”
One day, when I returned home from school, I noticed a stack of empty boxes on the Nakamura’s side of our porch. I could make a neat playhouse out of them, I thought. Maybe the Nakamuras have the same idea. Or maybe . . . they’re moving! I knocked on their door. Ken answered.
“Hi, Marie. What can I do for you?”
“What’re you going to do with all those boxes?” I asked. Ken smiled. “We’re moving.”
“Moving? No. Are you really? Are you leaving camp?”
“We’re just moving to Block 39, which is close to the hospital. An apartment opened up there. With the baby coming and all, we thought it would be convenient.”
“Wow! That’s really great!” I said. Then I realized that didn’t sound quite right. “I mean that’s great that you’re going to be so close to the hospital. Of course, I’m sorry to hear you’re moving. I’ll miss you all.”
What I wanted to say was, “That’s the greatest news I’ve heard in a long time! With your wife gone, we can have some peace and quiet around here!” I’m sure the Nakamuras were glad to be rid of us as well. Everyone could breathe a great sigh of relief. Except Papa. He was very sad.
“She reminded me of Mama when she was young,” he confided to me one day. If that was meant to make me feel better, it didn’t.
CHAPTER 14
&n
bsp; “Over the Rainbow”
JUDY GARLAND
The Sakais moved into 8-2-D soon after. They were an older couple along with their married daughter and grandson. Their daughter’s husband was in the army, fighting in France. Our barrack got considerably quieter.
And Papa finally got the job he was waiting for. He was hired as director of Community Activities. Mama also moved out of the kitchen as pot washer and into the administration building as a clerk typist. She had been to business college before she was married. Mama’s salary was increased to $16 a month from $12. Papa also made $16 a month. Only professional people like doctors made the top salary of $19 a month.
Mama greeted the news of being hired in the office with mixed feelings. She was pleased that she would be out of the kitchen, but worried about her wardrobe.
“I didn’t bring much in the way of ‘presentable’ clothes.” She held up the two dresses she brought. One was a sleeveless black thing gathered at the shoulders, and the other, a brown dress with large brass ornaments on the right shoulder and waist, “I may have to order some dresses from Sears Roebuck . . .”
“Buy new clothes? That makes no sense! You might as well stay home! Or maybe you can get your old job back!”
“You spent all that money on your clothes when we had the cleaners and I never said anything! I should be able to buy new clothes now, if I want!” They were at it again . . . would they ever stop fighting? It made my stomach turn. No doubt it would be the grist for the gossip mill tomorrow.
Mama decided on the brown dress to wear to work the first day. It looked like a party dress to me. Both her dresses did. But she had little choice. The second day, she wore her usual skirt and blouse.
“Most of the people in the office are young, single women. I’m the oldest clerk typist there. Everyone dresses casually,” she said. She didn’t have to buy new clothes. All that arguing for nothing.
* * *
Shortly after our arrival at Rohwer, I met a girl who lived in the apartment next to the entrance to the mess hall. She was my height, but chubbier. She had eyebrows that met in the middle and a nose that exposed its nostrils to the fullest. She would swipe at her nose with the back of her hand, pushing it farther up her face. Her hair was bobbed in a dutch boy cut. I assumed she was my age, because of her size, but something was not quite right about how she talked. Then I discovered that she was only six to my ten! Even among Japanese Americans, I was a shrimp. Much to my further disappointment, I soon learned that there were no girls my age in the block. There were several girls who were a year older or a year younger and they were classmates at school. I, on the other hand, had no one like that. So, I had a life in school and another in our block.
Outside of school, I spent a good deal of time visiting with older people. Ruby Matsumoto was in high school. She was a cheerful teenager who always had a song on her lips. She would either be belting one out or singing just under her breath. She walked with a bounce that set her loose pageboy in motion. Her wavy bangs barely touched her eyebrows that sat high above her slender eyes, set in a permanent smile. She was one of the most cheerful people I had ever met.
Ruby made her own pleated skirts, with applied silk-screened patterns of her own design.
Although Ruby was a very popular girl with many friends, she always had time for me. She often invited me to her apartment so I could watch her work. She sketched and carved a pattern, then glued it to a silkscreen. Then she would place fabric under the screen, put a line of paint on it, and pull it across the cloth with a squeegee. She used a squeegee just like the one Papa used when washing the show window back home at the cleaners. Lifting the screen left the design on the fabric. She also did stenciling that was not as elaborate but also involved cutting a design out of stiff paper and applying paint to the cut-out area.
I told her about the man in the assembly center who painted fans.
“I’m really sorry you weren’t able to keep that fan. It sounds very beautiful.”
“Do you ever oil paint?” I asked Ruby.
“Actually, if I were to paint a picture, I would use my silk screen or do block printing. Whenever I make any kind of print, I never know exactly how it’ll look until I complete it. I find that exciting.” Her dream was to someday design clothes to sell to people.
I also visited with Terry, a young mother with a five-month-old daughter. Terry was a pretty, rather dark-complected lady with thin sparkling eyes framed by heavy arching eyebrows. She wore her hair in an upsweep pulled forward into two enormous pompadours. Her baby daughter, June, had very round, closely spaced eyes and was not as pretty a baby as I would have thought Terry’s would be. Terry’s sole occupation was to take care of June, so I often found her at home. I would visit my aunt and cousin, then share what I had learned with Terry. For example, I told her about the little folded origami objects my aunt made from old newspaper that she had colored with crayons. These were hung by thread and tied to branches close to the doorway, so they would twist and turn with the breeze. It would keep little Ray occupied for hours. It worked with June as well.
* * *
Although we had frequent rain showers, in late November, the rains arrived in earnest.
“In order for it to be green and lush, there needs to be a lot of moisture,” Papa said. The once empty moats brimmed with water and the bridges across them became barely passable. I wasn’t allowed to walk on them during heavy rains.
“You’re so little, if you slipped off, you would drown,” warned Mama. That was enough to keep me away from them. The driveway behind the kitchen was the only way out of our block for me. The ground also became a soggy mess. Water moccasin snakes lurked in the moats and in the puddles that developed under our barracks. Wood piles shrank as the temperatures dropped, and the smell of burning wood filled the air. Lightning crashed through the trees and occasionally hit its mark. A tall majestic tree behind our barrack was struck with such force, the trunk split into two pieces. The weaker half separated cleanly from the rooted portion. Fortunately, it came to rest parallel to the barracks. We were spared.
“Lush growth and tall trees are a curse,” I told Papa. “They bring torrents of water, lightning, bogs, and snakes. There isn’t one thing good about it!” I longed for the clean lines of concrete sidewalks, the apartment buildings, and the stucco homes of San Francisco. I missed Jean, Maxine, Alice, and all the other kids at Lawton. I missed being able to go to the store and to visit my friends. I missed the sand and the beach. . . .
One morning, I was awakened by Brian who was shouting in my ear.
“Marie! Wake up! It’s snowing outside! Hurry up and get dressed!” I sat up in my bed and looked out the window. From there I could see the roof of the barrack across the way. It had been transformed from a dull gray to a glistening white. I slid up out of my tightly tucked blanket cocoon and ran barefoot across the icy floor to peer out the window. Small white particles were floating down from the sky and landing on the whiteness that already covered the trees and everything on the ground. I had never seen snow before. It was magnificent. I poured a little hot water out of the kettle on the hot plate into my wash basin and dipped my toothbrush in it. I ran my brush quickly around my teeth and splashed a little water on my face. Then I pulled off my nightgown, slipped into my warm long-sleeve sweater, knee socks and skirt, boots, and my princess coat.
“I don’t think you should wear that coat out there,” Mama said. “Wear your rain cape.” She was referring to my long blue waterproof cape with attached hood.
“It’s snowing, Mama. Not raining,” I said. “I’m not going to get wet.” Then I bolted out the door. Brian was already outside. When I stepped onto the porch, the bits of ice that landed on my coat looked like tiny pieces of rice. As if to read my mind, Brian said, “It’s sleet. It isn’t snow. Snow comes down as flat flakes.”
“Oh,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said. He sounded disappointed.
“Well, whateve
r it is, it’s beautiful,” I said and pulled my hood up over my head.
“Let’s go over to the rec hall area,” Brian said.
There was a large clearing there, behind the laundry room. It was a gathering spot for kids. When we arrived it seemed as though every school age kid in our block was there. And more. Snowballs were flying from the vicinity of the wood pile to the rec hall. I was immediately drawn into a war. My high-school-age friend, Ruby, her brother, Brian’s best friend, Frank, and some boys from another block were there.
“Marie! Come help us. Be on our team!” Ruby said from behind a pile of logs. “Help us make some ammunition!” By that she meant snowballs.
“Wow, you look really pretty in that coat, Marie,” Joey said. He was Ruby’s friend from school. “You’re as beautiful as Ruby!” I was so glad I wore it.
There were also logs to be moved to enlarge the fort to accommodate newcomers. I pitched right in. It was great fun, but getting hit by snowballs and moving dirty logs was a wet and messy business.
When I returned home Mama had a look of disbelief as her wide eyes scanned my coat.
“Look at it! It’s ruined! I’m not going to be able to clean it, you know. We aren’t in the cleaning business anymore!” I took it off and examined it. And Mama was right, it looked terrible. There were dark brown stains on the pale beige sleeves and front from carrying the logs. I should have listened to Mama when we were at Sears, I thought. I should have picked a darker coat, then the stains would not be so prominent.
Because it was wool, after the coat dried, it was misshapen. It was clear where the snowballs and sleet had soaked it. The shoulders and upper back were puckered and the sleeves had shrunk so much the lining was showing. It was grotesque. My princess coat was now truly fit for a clown.
CHAPTER 15
The Little Exile Page 14