Home Front Lines

by Brenda Sparks Prescott

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Fuji. No, I’m adopted, so no, my parents were not sent away.”

  “I thought . . .” David said.

  Veronica’s imaginary family lost a house and other possessions during their confinement, according to her conversations with David, but those tales didn’t fit into this scenario. She laid a hand on his arm. He got the signal. Mrs. Fuji picked up on the gesture, also. Veronica was struck by a glint of frightening shrewdness in that one look. Her studied calm evaporated along with the delicate scent of her Je Reviens perfume. She called on the Buddha of gracious conduct: give me strength and keep me from exposure, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

  “You thought?” Mrs. Fuji said.

  “I thought she was from Seattle.” He didn’t sound convincing, probably not even to himself. He reached for the swan again. Veronica let him have it. Nothing good could come of his blunders.

  “Were you put up for adoption because you’re only part Japanese?” the daughter asked.

  Mrs. Fuji gasped and covered her mouth.

  Her daughter turned to her. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Not here, anyway. But one hears tales.”

  Veronica expected the old sting of disgrace, but it didn’t rise. The daughter was right. Here, only other Japanese could tell she had mixed blood, and they no longer filled her days with their exclusive conformity. Besides, she was American now. This was the land of immigration and mixed identities.

  Mrs. Fuji shook her head. “Please pardon my forward daughter.” She peered at Veronica.

  Although the sharp glint was gone from the mother’s eyes, under the touch of her gaze Veronica felt that she was gauging the depth of cut her daughter had inflicted. Veronica felt bereft of family and longed to tell someone, this someone, the truth about herself. Himself. Years ago, her mother’s family had shunned the two of them in public because her mother had had a son with a foreign missionary. When he returned to Germany, he left behind an unwed mother and bad blood with her kin. What a mess, and the child was a living reminder of it.

  “Do you have any other family here?” David asked Mrs. Fuji.

  “My son, Koichi, his two boys, and his wife. They live in San Francisco.” Mrs. Fuji lowered her eyes.

  “The rest of the family didn’t survive the War,” the daughter said. “Mother had a sister, but we never heard from her, so we assume she’s gone too.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” David said.

  White flash.

  The smell of charred flesh pierced through Veronica’s carefully constructed shield. She stood without thinking. The others started at her abrupt movement, so she tried to cover by drifting over to the glass cases filled with dolls.

  “What a lovely collection,” she said, returning to an earlier topic. Most of them were Japanese, but a few outsiders in European costumes were mixed in.

  David again took her cue. “Please tell us more about them.”

  Veronica noticed a hat doll dressed in a flowered, red kimono. She wore and carried several hats shaped like the top of a pin cushion. Her aunt had given her a hat girl just like that one when she was the boy Youji. The seal melted.

  BY THE TIME Youji had dug out of the rubble in the back yard after the bright flash, his mother and his friend were already dead under the toppled wall from the house next door. He could see her arm around the boy’s body, as if she had tried to protect him. Youji’s injured shoulder and arm were useless, so he was unable to dislodge the bodies, and his frantic neighbors didn’t answer his pleas for help. At one point, as he continued to claw at sections of the wall, he whacked the smaller body on the head, furious that the boy had taken Youji’s place in his mother’s embrace.

  Exhaustion overcame him, and he lay as close as he could to his mother’s cool flesh. He wanted nothing more than to join her, but when fire swept up the street and into the yard, it forced him back to life. Escape through leaping flames was impossible, so he hid in the well behind the house. The unceasing rains followed. He hauled himself out of the damp hole but was unable to move more than that. His world had disappeared. He lost track of the minutes and hours.

  Some time later he heard his aunt calling. He started to crawl but made little progress because his joints were stiff from the damp. He heard his aunt and another woman weeping in the front yard, apologizing over and over for leaving her sister and nephew behind. He tried to shout, but his voice had been taken by the smoke, and he went unheard. His aunt said prayers for the dead. “I’m alive,” Youji whispered, and then a possibility grew that stopped the raindrops in midair. If his aunt thought he were dead, he could be whatever and whoever he wanted to be. Finally. He stopped crawling and lay still. The rain continued on its course. Much later, when he pulled himself into the front yard, his aunt and the bodies were gone.

  After the fighting stopped, Youji drifted up to Osaka, where he experimented with the trappings of a new identity. With all of the American involvement in post-war Japan, the United States seemed a good landing place for a phoenix that had risen from an American conflagration. He learned about adult desires as he negotiated his passage across the Pacific without proper papers. Youji Toshiko landed in Los Angeles. Veronica Wills moved from there to San Diego a few years later.

  VERONICA’S ATTENTION SLOWLY returned to the Kobayashi’s bright living room. David was saying that he didn’t realize that dolls could be so valuable. He was sorry now that he had cut all of the hair off of his sister’s dolls years ago. Veronica touched the case of the hat girl. She hoped her absence hadn’t been noticed.

  “I had a wonderful aunt who gave me a doll just like this.” She pointed to it and glanced at Mrs. Fuji. “I loved that doll, but my mother wouldn’t let me play with it.” There. One line of truth from the past.

  “Why not?” the daughter asked. She came over to open the case and hand the doll to Veronica.

  Because boys don’t play with dolls. “She thought it a waste of time,” Veronica answered. She brushed the cascade of hats, then handed the doll back.

  “I played with this one, and now it’s a collectible. Imagine that.” The daughter put the doll back and they both returned to their seats.

  Veronica took a last sip from her tea and with both hands placed the cup on the tray. “It’s been an honor to visit your home today.”

  “The honor is ours. We hope you will return soon,” the daughter said.

  “Mrs. Fuji, weren’t you recently on a Naval ship in the Pacific?” David said.

  Oh David. Things had been wrapping up nicely. Now Mrs. Fuji squinted at them, as if reviewing their entire conversation in light of this one sentence. Even the bold daughter froze, her eyes bouncing to and away from her mother’s face.

  Veronica tapped David’s knee. “Plenty of time for that later. Now we must be going.” She rose with enough force to automatically bring him to his feet also. She squeezed his elbow, a warning not to utter another word outside of those common to saying goodbye. The mother and daughter also rose, with Mrs. Fuji taking Veronica’s hand and looking at her intently.

  Outside on the front walk Veronica asked, “What were you thinking in there?”

  “Come on, she had to know something was up. I don’t have all the time in the world.”

  Veronica shook her head.

  “Besides, why did you say you were adopted?” David asked.

  “Did you want to focus on my story or theirs?” Veronica was returning more fully to her current life. She took his arm. “You already know my story.”

  At the car he disengaged himself to open the passenger side door. “Do I?”

  She sat in the car. “Of course you do. I’m a simple girl.”

  He shook his head as he closed the door.

  Chita

  A Message from García 2

  THE HARDEST PART was waiting through the night in our house. Alone. Diego was in Havana to set up his special commission. That night he was probably smoking cigars and telling lies. I had promised him a haircut when he returned th
e next day, but I wondered if I could keep all of my own lies straight, between the children’s supposed harvest adventure and our false familial visit to Tío Juan. Rosie was putting on an act for Ramón at a patron’s house in Varadero Beach. At least that’s what she was supposed to be doing. I still worried about that one. Lola was out at the boat, the last of us to see the children. I should have gone with her. I should have insisted, but she and Rosie convinced me that one sister in danger was better than two. How I wished to be in her skin, to lay my hand on Beto’s chubby check one last time.

  I tried to pack for our trip east, but it was nearly impossible with the boat operation underway. I wandered from room to quiet room, meaning to pick up something and then forgetting what. I went into the boys’ room to close the curtains against the night but found the simple muslin shield they made too suffocating and had to draw them open again. At one point during the night, I looked down to find myself holding one of my flat, black shoes as I stood over Miguelito’s bed. I went back to my own bedroom and let the shoe drop beside the dresser. I had no idea where the other one was. I don’t think I ever found it.

  I thought I would never sleep again, but I woke to Rosita’s touch, butterflies trembling in her fingers. I was curled into a ball in Beto’s bed with the chess set’s black king cradled in my palm.

  “In here,” she called, and Lola soon clumped through the doorway.

  “Gone,” she said.

  Sunlight streamed in the window and lit her tired face as she slowly crossed the room to sit on Miguelito’s bed. With such an awakening by my sisters, I did not have one illusionary moment that everything was just as it had been when I woke the day before. No disorientation allowed me to wonder what to make the boys for breakfast. No. I had to move forward immediately to keep from sinking into chaotic agitation. I let the black king roll from my fingers onto the cover and squirmed to sit beside Rosie.

  “No moping,” I said to her. “We have too much to do to find Tomás.”

  “Yes,” Lola said from the other bed. “So much to do.” She ran her hand over the thin spread and clenched a handful of it by her thigh. “And of course I’ll help with everything.”

  “What are you talking about?” I imagined my own clenched fist in her hair, dragging some sense out of her.

  “Don’t be mad,” Rosie said. “It’s not her fault she can’t go with us. We’ll be all right.” She patted the hand I had unknowingly drawn into a fist.

  “Mary, Mother of God, will you make some sense for once?”

  “No need to shout.” Rosie’s taps grew into small slaps.

  “Captain B. was there,” Lola said.

  “Where?”

  “At the beach, with José, right after the launch. I think he knew about the boat, but . . .”

  “But what?” If we were to live through the day it would be a miracle, I thought.

  “They should be safe. They are safe. They are safe. From him, I mean. Only I can’t go with you.”

  I lurched into the small space dividing us, intending I don’t know what. It would not have been the first time that Lola and I had come to blows as adults. Rosie blocked me with her forearm, and Lola scooted away to stand against the boys’ dresser.

  “I have to go to another Russian camp—I can’t come home every night,” Lola said. “I have to go for the children. I have to go. With him.”

  I suddenly stopped straining against Rosie, and the force of her uncontested restraint threw me back onto the bed. Dear God, would this madness ever stop? A woman can choose to compromise her own virtue. Lola had before—we knew about her blond—but to trade against it for her own children and with uncertain outcome? Madness, that was all I could think. Rosie was talking again, but I couldn’t hear her from the depths of my own discouragement.

  “What?”

  “I said, we were thinking that someone here needs to know, in case word comes while we’re gone.”

  Or in case we don’t return. We were all thinking it, but no one would say it aloud. Just thinking it brought it too close to reality.

  “The only people we trust are in the boat or in this room,” I said.

  “José is a soldier, we can’t compromise him,” Rosie said. “And Ramón, well with the CDR and his brother’s accident.” She shook her head. “But Diego . . .”

  No, no, no, no. No.

  “And not a word about Tomás,” Rosie said. “We still don’t know who is with us and who is not.”

  You should talk with your two-faced husband, I almost blurted, but I didn’t. I wished I could go after her the way I did Lola, but I didn’t. Never could. There’s something about that Rosie, despite her aggravations. Instead I said, “Great, I say the one thing I never dreamed of saying to my husband, but I get to lie about Tomás. I am sure we will rot in hell.”

  I HAD MYSELF under control by the time I left for Diego’s haircut at my salon. It was on a busy street full of shops not far from the Concordia Bridge. I hurried along, greeted other shopkeepers, and waved to friends in passing cars as if that day were much the same as the one before. Diego was further up the street at the corner with several other machinists. He was rolling a cigarette but nodded in my direction as I paused in front of my shop. I unlocked the door and went inside. The white plaster walls glowed behind posters of American hairdos and recent pictures of our leaders. I had hoped to add a third chair that year, but with the rules changing every day and ownership of property constantly in question, it was prudent not to invest. Even so, my schedule called for an assistant. She would watch the shop while I was gone with Rosita. She would welcome the extra income, as little as it was.

  I arranged my scissors and combs and brought out a fresh stack of hot-pink towels, but still Diego had not appeared. I went outside and stood, hands on hips, to stare down the sidewalk at the group of cronies. Diego nodded again, but I knew machismo wouldn’t allow him to leave the other men until I went back inside. I sat in one of the chairs to wait, but as soon as I swiveled around to inspect the unruly patch of hair behind my left ear, the door opened. Diego brought in an aura of cigarette smoke and smooched my hand that was still playing with my hair.

  “Go on now,” I told him. “Over to the sink. We don’t have all day.”

  “I would lasso the sun and tie him to the thigh of Che to have more time with you, mamacita,” he said. He danced a backward rumba to lead me to the sink.

  A giggle escaped me, despite my unease. “Hush your mouth and sit.” This was not the moment to tell him about the boys, but soon. “Lie all the way back. That’s it, just relax your shoulders.” He rested his neck on the pink towel that was folded over the lip of the sink.

  I waited for the water to warm, then directed the nozzle to wet Diego’s hair. I’m an excellent judge of hair texture, ability to hold color, and the type of cuts that would flatter both the natural swirls in the hair and the composition of the face, but I couldn’t treat this head as just another customer. Diego’s straight brown hair thinned on top. I slicked it back from his high forehead. Pendants of water clumped together at the ends of his fine strands. His pale scalp peeked through. This covert nudity and the delicacy of his closed eyelids drew a rapier point from the hollow of my throat to the bowl of my breastbone.

  I grabbed a slender bottle of shampoo and sniffed it. “One moment. Let me get another shampoo for you. This one is too flowery for a man.”

  He nodded, eyes still closed. I turned off the tap and hurried through the curtain to the tiny back room. It was a closet lined with shelves but big enough to stand in. Before the Revolution, the latest concoctions from the United States packed the shelves. Now the gels and liquids with Yanqui names ran low in their glamorous bottles and jars. I filled more and more of them with homemade mixtures that worked just as well as the originals but didn’t smell as sophisticated. Should I spend a few precious drops of New York shampoo on Diego, a man? Would he appreciate it?

  The Madonna’s voice emanated from behind a Yanqui blue bottle on the
middle shelf. “It is time to tell him about the boys.”

  “In a minute,” I said.

  “Now,” the voice said.

  I wished I could scream at Her the way Lola did. “Go away,” I said, louder.

  “What?” Diego asked.

  “Nothing, papi, just worrying aloud about my supplies.”

  “You can do that later. Come on, Chita, it doesn’t take this long at the barber shop.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I snatched the blue bottle from the shelf and shook it. The voice remained silent as I returned to my husband’s side. I nudged a place for the shampoo on the shelf above the sink, rinsed his hair again, and then lathered him up.

  He inhaled deeply, the nostrils of his thin, straight nose flaring. “Wasting the good stuff on your husband? You must be feeling guilty about something.” He smiled with his eyes still closed and wiped a drip from his forehead.

  I forced out a laugh. Rinse and lather.

  Diego tapped his fingers on his knees. “Do you think Beto and Miguelito will teach chess to those country boys?”

  I rinsed a second time before I opened my mouth to answer him.

  A Glass Swan 3

  VERONICA HAD A deadline to meet. Fiesta ware was done. Time to revive a more subtle style. Jaqueline would certainly agree. Veronica studied the curved lips of the seaform green serving bowl that sat beside her typewriter.

  Russel Wright dishes are a must for the modern family on the go. The famous designer has covered all bases for smart entertaining, from jet set living room suites to snappy bowls and platters.

  She paused to read her opening, red pencil in hand, when one of the boys slumped into the chair beside her desk.

  “Howdy, Tommy,” she said. She was one of the few who bothered to call him by the right name. “You haven’t been around much.”

  He checked out the green serving bowl, looked at Veronica. She pointed the pencil at her story. Tommy nodded.