On the way home, Maddalena inched across the truck’s bench seat, as wide as an aircraft carrier, until she was within easy kissing distance. Tom drove in silence, while Maddalena tried to make conversation. “That was fun,” she said; then, “Did you see Edith and Bennie? I bet they’ll be going steady by Monday.”
Tom nodded, his eyes on the road. When they got to her house, he shook her hand and mumbled, “Thanks. I had a good time.”
“Me too.” Maddalena squeezed his limp hand and Tom stared at the steering wheel. “A real good time, I mean. You’re a good dancer.” Nothing. “Well, good night.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, which seemed to turn him to stone, and got out of the truck before he could move again, much less think about walking her to the door.
Hopeless, one hundred percent hopeless. But it was her first date, so that was something. She dried the corsage, then stashed it in her grandfather’s smoking stand, a small, square cabinet with a single door atop long, skinny legs. That was where she hid her keepsakes—a cable car ticket from San Francisco, sea glass found on the beach near Los Angeles, a dried baby lizard, and a handkerchief sloppily embroidered with her initials in blue, done when she was eight.
For months after the date with Tom, Maddalena would imagine being in that truck with a different boy, with a handsome boy who wanted to kiss her. Her elegant green skirt would be hiked up and her lipstick smeared. The thought made touching herself even better.
The coyotes fell silent. Maddalena went back to bed.
The simple fact was that Akira made her feel alive, and no other boy had ever done that. When he looked at her, the world seemed as endless as the night sky, full of adventures and surprises. Something had begun, something unknown and impossible. Maddalena thumped her pillow. Even if what she felt was love, she couldn’t marry Akira or anyone like him. He had Japanese blood, and that made him more of a fantasy than Clark Gable. Maybe in San Francisco, where real things happened, where people wore beautiful clothes and went to the movies and restaurants and strolled along the bay, it would be permissible for an Italian girl and a Japanese boy to be together. But not here. People in Owens Valley didn’t think that way. Her parents already spoke of her marrying one of the boys in town, someone steady and good with the land. There weren’t any other Italians in Lone Pine; if there were, Mama would want one of their sons to marry her daughter, even if he was ugly and Maddalena didn’t give a fig about him. She might as well forget about San Francisco.
Curled on her side, Maddalena gazed at the night sky and wondered whether Akira was asleep. How could anyone sleep behind barbed wire, trapped like an animal? She imagined him curled up beside her, a coyote no one could catch.
Ten
July 3, 1945
By the summer of 1944, Manzanar had become part of the valley’s landscape. Though the war in Europe had ended, Japan remained defiant; in America, we remained prisoners.
Gradually, fear and hatred of us seemed to diminish. Many of the valley’s residents came to our festivals and concerts, watched our children graduate from high school and win baseball games, admired our gardens and asked us how we could coax lushness from the earth when their own efforts shriveled in the sun and frayed in the wind. They set aside the guns they’d bought when they heard we were coming. And why wouldn’t they have feared us? They too had been lied to.
Some people, though, would always hate us. This we knew. We wondered if Akira and the white girl understood. These people couldn’t see beyond their hatred, refused to take off their blinders. We accepted their judgment. Shikata ga nai, we said to one another with a sigh or a shrug. It cannot be helped. Shikata ga nai, we said when we rose in the morning, when we lined up for the latrine or for the inedible food we had learned to eat. We said that every day for three years, every day since we were torn from our homes. Every day, we struggled to preserve our dignity. A difficult task.
Shikata ga nai. We endured, found beauty in ugliness, patience in work, peace in etching out small pleasures. We worked hard to make Manzanar feel like home, though we knew such a thing was impossible. Time helped. What could never be a home became familiar, and there was comfort in that. Now, linoleum covered the floors we could see through when we first arrived; ceilings closed off open rafters that had carried our whispers and coughs and moans and smells from one end of the barracks to the other; wallboard sealed cracks sought by the wind and covered knotholes once patched with the lids of tin cans; dividers imitated privacy in the bathrooms where the toilets stood inches apart. Bright-colored curtains flapped in our windows.
We endured. We made rock gardens, built a waterfall.
As the years passed, we were given what we had not lacked until we came to Manzanar, as if we should be grateful: schools and churches, a hospital. Laundry rooms and a hair salon, an auditorium with a stage. We were given the chance to work, though it was not work of our choosing. At Manzanar we were firemen and office clerks, cooks and custodians, boiler-room keepers and camouflage net weavers, anything to earn a few dollars, to help to pass the time. Some of us were newspapermen, the Manzanar Free Press our mouthpiece. For news of the outside, we old men gathered on stoops, listening to scratchy transmissions from an illegal short-wave radio. It was one way to fight back: hearing what any other American could hear.
We had our ways.
But we had given up homes and businesses, fishing boats and farms. Those who worked shrugged off lethargy, but we held fast to our bitterness. We were not who we wanted to be. We had given up dreams.
A tolerable life does not change an intolerable fact: ten thousand prisoners in the early years. That was before some of us left, forsaking dreams of returning home to accept a conditional freedom, moving to parts of the country where the government believed we would pose no threat. Others, the defiant or rebellious or honest among us, were sent back to Japan for answering “no, no” instead of “yes, yes” to the two impossible questions they asked us about loyalty, questions that could not be answered with a single word, questions that meant different things to different people. And some of us, young men, left Manzanar to join the 442nd, the Japanese American regiment. Dangerous enough to lock up at home, we were trustworthy enough to pick up guns in France and Germany. “Go for broke” was our motto, those of us who became soldiers to defend our country. What did we have to lose?
“Our country.” Only those of us who were Nisei, Sansei, born here, could say that. The Issei among us, lacking American blood, had nowhere to set down roots.
Shikata ga nai. The loss of our homes, the indignity and injustice of imprisonment, the desert’s brutality—we accepted these things. But acceptance is not forgiveness. We would not forgive the men with guns, nor the men who placed them in towers, ready to shoot for good reason or for no reason at all. In those long years of the war, it didn’t matter whom the guards shot at, what flimsy excuse they had. What mattered was that their guns were aimed at us. What mattered was that there were shots, and that we heard them and went about our lives.
On a July night with a hot wind blowing, Akira came into the canteen. Four of us, old men with thinning hair and long teeth, were playing cards at a corner table. Young men with round eyeglasses and hair slicked back killed time drinking soda and smoking, wishing for a Coke instead of a LaVida, a pack of Camels or Lucky Strikes instead of the Chelseas we had to make do with. Girls in pleated skirts and buttoned blouses played bridge and tossed smiles at the young men, brash like we used to be, snapping their gum.
Akira went straight to the piano. We watched him; we had little else to do. And we were curious. The shot fired the day before had set women to talking and men to shaking their heads. If the stories were true, Akira was a fool. What business did he have with a white girl, someone who didn’t know what we suffered? To her, Manzanar would be nothing more than a blight in the valley, defined by a fence that did nothing to limit her. She would not notice the length of the days as we did; she
would not know how cruel the high desert could be when what passed for shelter rattled in the wind, sucked in heat, cracked with cold. The girl would not know the humiliation of living beneath guard towers black against the sky, sun sparking on the barrel of a rifle. She would not understand that their deadly gaze told us we were worthless, subhuman.
We watched him, Akira. Perhaps his parents did not know what he would risk, or perhaps they chose not to know. It would pain them. He was only a boy, unconcerned with risks. We saw it on his face, the excitement, the eagerness. We understood what he did not. Being old, we had little to lose; being young, he had too much. He did not see that. It was no surprise. Most of us had put on blinders—a matter of survival, the acquired apathy of the caged.
That day Akira played scales and tremolos that made us think of waterfalls and fountains. “Play us a song,” we called, old men bent and bald with spider-webbed skin. “Play ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’ ” Soda bottles and glasses left wet rings on the scarred table; frayed cards made slapping sounds.
Akira played the song, every note a lament. Afterward, he hunched over, ear to the keyboard, playing a short melody, delicate and lovely. There was heartache in it. Then a single phrase played over and over again, a note changed here or there; the rhythm altered, the tempo. This way, that way, now this again, and again, so insistent we thought we would go mad.
Annabelle walked in, light in her eyes. She stood next to Akira, smiling, and bore his inattention. He paused, began again. She sat next to him on the bench, fluffed and smoothed her skirt. Akira played, his head down. Could she not see his disinterest? We whispered among ourselves, wrinkled faces over wrinkled cards, young smooth faces half hidden behind hands cupping cigarettes. Annabelle’s eyes announced her desire, told us what she dreamed of—a husband at her side, a child on her knee. Foolish girl, what had she given up for him? Her pride, her virtue? More than she would have given up at home, that much we knew. A desolate place led to desperation.
The war would not be kind to Annabelle, but she did not know that yet. We old men, having the advantage of maleness and being past the age where loss sears like boiling water on flesh, we could bear the war and its residue. Having already lived long, we would not measure our remaining days against the background of our imprisonment. Annabelle would. The camp, we knew, would take too much from her—youth, pride, hope. It would take Akira too. His mind was elsewhere, his heart not bound by barbed wire. We knew this because we had once been like him.
Annabelle leaned in, her shoulder brushing his. We wished we were young again. The strength of her body, the firmness of her flesh, the clarity in her eyes—we remembered these things, wanted them anew. Nodding to one another, we dreamed briefly of desire. Fanning our cards, stacking our coins, sucking our toothpicks, we let our gaze slide toward the girl and linger. We would never stop wanting.
The door swung open, ushered in a hard wind that smelled of emptiness. Two men entered, one of them Annabelle’s brother, Harry. He wore a goatee, a sharp-eyed look, and walked like a mountain lion tasting rabbit in the air. His friend Jiro wore the sleeves of his white T-shirt rolled up, short hair that showed his scalp. He strolled, the world his. They ordered sodas, pulled out cigarettes, watched Annabelle and Akira.
Annabelle’s fingers crept to Akira’s arm. “Please,” Akira said, still playing. Her hand retreated.
Harry sprang to the piano. “What gives?” he said. Annabelle shook her head, eyes pleading. Jiro stood by, ready to launch. Akira said nothing, his eyes and hands on the keys. Harry flicked the keyboard cover and it thudded onto Akira’s wrists.
“Harry!” Annabelle said.
“Damn it!” Akira pushed the cover up. “You got a problem?”
“I said what gives? First you take what you shouldn’t from my little sister—”
“Harry, stop.” Annabelle’s face was pale.
“And now you act like she’s not worth your time. No one treats my sister like that.”
The air lost its emptiness. We angled our bodies in our chairs, took our elbows off the counter, stopped on our way out the door. Everywhere eyes turned toward the piano, faces brightened. This we did not want to miss. This was what we had become.
“Annabelle and I are none of your business,” Akira said.
Harry cocked his head. “You’re wrong about that. You make her unhappy and I’ll kill you,” he said. Jiro laughed.
“I don’t hear Annabelle complaining,” Akira said.
Annabelle stood, a trembling leaf. “Harry, walk me home. You’re embarrassing me.”
Harry didn’t answer, his eyes on Akira.
“Please, Harry.”
Akira stood. “I’ll walk you.”
“Like hell you will,” Harry said. “Come on, Annabelle. This loser’s not worth your time.”
Jiro followed them. “Watch your step,” he said to Akira, jutting his chin.
Akira began to play again and we picked up our cards, went back to our conversations. What had happened this night would not be the end of it, that much we knew. Akira saw only the white girl, the freedom beyond the fence. Not the danger inside the cage. Not the danger outside it.
Eleven
March 7, 2011
The morning after dinner at the Kanekos’, Kira woke up flattened by fear, convinced something was wrong with her, something she couldn’t categorize or articulate without sounding like a madwoman. Two daytime dreams. Whatever was going on, she wanted it to fit into the world she understood, a system of protocols, procedures, actions with prescribed effects and projected outcomes, a semblance of order, predictability, control. But those rules proved fallible too, every time a baby died who should have made it, every time a medication or surgery failed. Rules and order were artificial and arbitrary; people did what they had to in order to survive.
Dan came in bearing coffee. “Headache any better?”
“A little.”
“Mom called. She’s worried about you. So am I.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“We need to talk about this,” Dan said. “You need to see a doctor.”
Kira stalked to the bathroom and closed the door. From the bedroom, silence at first, then soft footsteps, the click of the closet door, blinds snapping open. Dan was undoubtedly waiting, hoping, for the answer he wanted. She let the shower run and stood next to it on the cold tiles, still in her pajamas, until he called goodbye and left for work. Then she went back to bed and googled “dreaming while awake” and “causes of hallucinations.” Failing to find anything reassuring, she pushed her laptop aside and curled up under the covers.
In the late afternoon Kira moved to the couch and flipped through the family albums again. There was her mother in a peasant blouse and bell-bottoms, her chestnut hair cut in long layers, standing next to the koi pond and holding an infant Kira. Kira’s father must have taken the photo—Rosa was laughing, her bare arms toned and strong, her gaze suggestive. In that moment, did she have any inkling that she’d be abandoned in a few years, left alone to raise a toddler? She had carried abandonment in her body like she’d carried Kira—herself motherless since age seventeen, and the daughter of a man she rarely mentioned. Her husband’s desertion would become a variation on a theme.
What had Rosa dreamed of as a child, a young woman? Motherhood, certainly; she’d often said how much she’d wanted Kira. Surely, as a Cal grad, she had aspired to more than the spirit-drowning secretarial jobs she’d worked for years in church offices and real estate agencies, days spent answering the phone and making order of other people’s messes. What had stopped her from achieving more? What darkness of spirit had sent her to her room time after time? Why hadn’t she remarried?
Questions with no answers.
If only loving her mother hadn’t required so much negotiated silence. Kira could bring up school, clothes, friends, vacations, or what she wanted for dinner, and Rosa
would chat brightly, full of ideas and questions. Bring up Rosa’s husband, mother, or childhood, though, and she retreated behind a barrier as impermeable as bedrock. Kira had inherited that habit of retreat, both desired and resented it. Yet in marrying Dan, choosing to have a child with him, she’d let her bedrock wall become porous like tufa or brittle like limestone, breachable by absorption or a blow. But that was before Aimi died.
Kira envied Camille, who told her husband everything and trusted him enough to bear three children within five years. What crucial ingredient did Cam have that Kira lacked?
The sound of the front door opening interrupted her thoughts. “Dan, come and look at this picture of Mom and me,” Kira said. “Doesn’t she look like an Italian Farrah Fawcett?”
“Totally,” Dan said, looking over her shoulder. He kissed her hair. “She was beautiful. I know how much you miss her. I miss her too.”
The Wild Impossibility Page 8