Dreaming Water

by Gail Tsukiyama

  We are so distinctly different in appearance that we create a kind of wonderment. What passes through people's minds when they see us together for the first time? That I'm the mother and she's my daughter? I can imagine the shock and dismay giving way to sympathy and compassion when they learn otherwise.

  When the distinct signs of Werner began to show on my face in my twenties, Cate kept inventing new ways to distract me from curious looks, soften the surprised glances of those who knew something was wrong with this small, pinched person, even if they couldn't quite pinpoint what. As we walked down the street, I could see myself in their eyes. I was too small, too underdeveloped for my age. My face was aging but my body hadn't matured — there was something seriously wrong they couldn't quite figure out. Who could blame them when they quickly looked away?

  We must have appeared to be a traveling sideshow, walking down the street, her arm possessively hooked through mine. But all through the years, she has never realized people weren't just staring at me but also watching her.

  When I was a little girl I used to gaze into the bathroom mirror and wonder why I didn't look anything like Cate. I often wondered if I'd had a brother or sister, would my sibling resemble my mother? Every morning I checked to see if something had miraculously changed overnight, turning me suddenly into my mother's daughter. After all, there was evidence of my father, Max, in the shape of my eyes and in my straight, black hair, which I usually wore in a ponytail then. But Cate's presence in me remained a mystery. How I prayed for some trace of her when I looked into the mirror each morning.

  "You have my lips and nose, kiddo, " she finally said to me one morning, pouring milk into my cereal. She smacked her lips and blew me a kiss.

  My father sat reading his newspaper before rushing off to work, rattling pages as he quickly turned them, sipping black coffee and eating toast with strawberry jam.

  "Aren't you glad you resemble the Murayama side of the family?" he teased from behind his paper.

  I was pleased to resemble Max, but I wanted some part of me to belong to my mother, too. I touched my full lips> staring first at Cate, then patiently waiting for Max to lower his paper so I could make a final assessment. Cate poured him another cup of coffee as I ate my cereal, never taking my eyes off him. Like clockwork^ the paper lowered and he reached for his coffee, raising the cup to his obviously thinner lips.

  I wanted to laugh with joy, jump up and hug both my wise, wonderful parents. It seems like a small thing to have stayed with me all these years, but it has.

  That night I looked in the mirror and saw my lips, full and luscious, forming the smooth curve of a smile just like my mother's reflecting back at me.

  CATE

  Heart Mountain

  When I finally told Hana the whole truth about Max and our second date, I swear I saw a glint of admiration in her eyes. She was sixteen, and I imagined it gave her a rare glimpse of a young, romantic mother and father she hadn't realized existed. Max had followed me back to Boston that weekend, and I had lied to my parents, telling them I was going out with an old Berkeley friend who happened to be in town. It seemed simpler than explaining to them I was going out with a Japanese man I'd met the day before in Waterford, Maine. I waited for Max down the street at the bus stop, anxiously listening for the roar of his Thunderbird, and I couldn't help but think of a conversation that I'd had with Papa after we'd seen the movie Bridge on the River Kwai.

  Almost thirteen years after the Second World War, his conservative ideals still prevailed. "The Japanese had it coming. If it weren't for the bomb, we'd still be fighting that war."

  "What about the Japanese Americans interned here in the United States? They were as American as we are," I said.

  "It was for their own safety," Papa said, lowering his voice. "After Pearl Harbor there was too much anger in the air."

  "An easy excuse for a terrible mistake," I said. "What if the president had interned all the German Americans because of Hitler, or the Italian Americans because of Mussolini?" It was a quick reminder that Papa's parents were immigrants themselves.

  Papa shook his head. "You are too young to know what was going on. You think four years at that left-wing university out West gives you all the answers!"

  "You better believe it." I laughed. He really believed that interning Japanese Americans had been for their own safety, and I knew nothing I could say would ever sway his thinking. But a moment later his face relaxed and he laughed along with me.

  On our second date. Max and I drove out to the beach near Gloucester, where we wouldn't be seen. All the way there I thought I'd burn in hell for eternity for lying to my mother and father. I was convinced every person we passed on the road had seen us and would tell them. At the same time, I felt ashamed of myself for not having the courage to introduce Max to my parents.

  But Max's quiet voice pulled me in, away from all these fears. We parked overlooking the beach, and while I didn't know where to begin, stumbling all over my words, he told me his life story easily. And so we paused only long enough, in the darkening light, to listen to the thundering of the waves below. What was it about him that I loved so much? I felt a soft rush of warmth inside as he spoke of his childhood dream of becoming a baseball player and, less happily, of his family's surviving wartime internment in Wyoming with other Japanese Americans. That very night, I knew I would marry Max. There was something courageous about him. He had left his family and friends and driven across the country in the new Thunderbird that he had worked four years, both as a teaching assistant and in an insurance office, to buy. He wasn't sure what he might find or how he would be received but knew only that here on the East Coast, Asians were still looked upon with reserve and apprehension.

  "A Texas cowboy wanted to rough me up in a bar in Amarillo," he told me. "And I was almost shot in Arkansas by an irate farmer."

  "Why?" I asked.

  He paused. "Because his son was killed in Bataan."

  Then we were both silent.

  "Weren't you afraid?" I finally asked.

  Max nodded. "Still am. But I wanted to see what the rest of America was all about. I couldn't just stay put in Los Angeles any longer."

  "And what did you see?"

  "There's always good" — he touched my hand — "as well as the bad. Better to face it than to run away."

  All through our marriage^ Max would surprise me with his ever-present optimism and determination.

  Max was the youngest of three children. His parents were Issei who had immigrated to California from Japan as children. They lived in a blue, wood-frame bungalow on two acres of land they leased near Pasadena. In long glass greenhouses, his father produced prize-winning chrysanthemums and made a good living for his family. His older sister, Sumi, was married to a Japanese American dentist and had two children of her own. His brother, Tag, ran the flower business with his parents in Los Angeles. As children, they imagined other worlds in the greenhouses, from the Amazon jungle to magical ice palaces. They ran from one glass house to the other, three in all, one for each child. The scents of moist earth and fertilizer and sweet-blooming carnations and chrysanthemums flavored their childhood. Max spoke of it like a faraway dream.

  Safely cocooned in the Thunderbird, I inhaled the aroma of his still-new leather seats mixed with a slightly salty scent of the ocean. A thin veil of darkness barely covered the sky.

  "My brother, Tag, has always been the one with the green thumb in our family," Max said. "Even as a kid he had the patience to make things grow. He saw that beauty comes with time and patience. I wanted everything right away, then sulked when I didn't get it. I was the youngest, the troublemaker." He smiled, as if he were talking about someone else. "I was constantly breaking the glass panes of the greenhouses, smashing them with the baseballs I'd hit when we played in back of the house. I always dreamed I'd someday play professional baseball. I can't describe the joy of hitting the ball just right, making that connection and knowing that I'd smacked the hell out of it."


  "What did your parents say?"

  "They yelled and scolded, then finally gave up and took the money for the glass out of my allowance." Max suddenly stopped as if he'd said too much about himself. "And what about you?" he asked.

  "I'm an only child. My parents hoped for more children, but it wasn't to be. 'God's will,' I heard Mama once tell my aunt Sophia. They've always wanted the best for me.

  "All parents do."

  "I guess so, but I always wished I'd had brothers and sisters to spread some of the concern around."

  Max laughed. "Believe me, they always muster up enough for each child."

  "Tell me about your sister," I said. I had always wanted one of my own.

  "Sumi just had to put up with us. Having to deal with two younger brothers and be an obedient Japanese daughter wasn't easy." He smiled.

  "You were all born in Pasadena?"

  Max nodded. "And we never lived anywhere else, except during the war," he said. "When I was nine, we were interned at Heart Mountain. My only happy memory of Wyoming was playing fast-pitch softball or football starting in spring, right through the oven-hot days of summer. When we couldn't play outside during the freezing winters, I boxed with my brother and the other boys to keep warm. We just couldn't stop moving, it was all we could do."

  When I asked him more about his camp experience, he shook his head and said, "When we played with other little kids in Pasadena, Tag and I were always the good guys. We fought for justice and killed the bad guys. Then one day the president declared me one of the bad guys, too, only I hadn't done anything bad. I saw my parents become old before their time at Heart Mountain. I was old enough to realize that we'd been imprisoned simply for looking different from everyone else."

  "Was your parents' flower business still there when you returned home?"

  Max nodded. "But it was in shambles. Rocks had shattered every pane of glass in each of the greenhouses. Only the frames still stood. Like many other families during that crazy time, my father made our Buddhist church the trustee of our property. I remember my mother whispering the word skeletons the day we returned home. Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Evans, had actually patrolled the grounds for us with his shotgun, or everything would have been destroyed. He's a man I'll never forget. The morning we had to leave, he told my dad not to worry, he'd take care of things. There wasn't much choice but to trust that he would do it. It was Mr. Evans who showed me that there's still a lot of kindness and fairness in the world."

  Max stopped talking and gazed out over the water. I felt an unbearable need to touch him, to remind him I was there next to him. I touched the sleeve of his jacket, and he turned to me and smiled.

  Then he cleared his throat and continued. "It took years to rebuild, but we were the fortunate ones. My parents worked hard all their lives and were lucky enough to find a way to hold on to their property. Most people weren't so lucky, they lost their leases and everything else they owned. A lifetime of work gone by the time they returned."

  "How long were you away at Heart Mountain?"

  Max rubbed his eyes. Even in gray evening shadows, I could see he was no longer smiling. "From the middle of nineteen forty-two to the end of nineteen forty-five."

  The sea breeze was soft, the slap of the waves insistent, but Max's stories of Heart Mountain conjured arid desert visions in my mind. I wanted to understand it all. What was it like to be forced to give up everything and pack your entire life into two suitcases? Where did you sleep? How did you keep warm enough during the winters? Was there enough to eat? And, most important, weren't you angry that the country of your birth had turned against you? The questions rose to the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them back down when Max opened the car door and stepped out into the warm night air, gesturing for me to follow.

  Max stayed for three weeks in Boston and met my parents all of two times after I'd finally told them he was my friend from California. Then he returned to Los Angeles to work for an old professor as a teaching assistant. I stayed in Boston and worked at my father's law office. Our goal was to save enough money to start a life somewhere together. We wrote each other every week and saved every cent we made. Ten months later, at the end of the school term. Max returned to Boston and we were married at City Hall with two strangers as our witnesses, against the wishes of my parents, who had "nothing personal against Max" but simply wanted an easier life for me.

  Two weeks earlier, when I broke the news to them about our marrying, it was Mama who spoke up first, for a change. "Marriage is a big commitment, Caterina. There are enough problems to deal with, without having to worry about the prejudices you might encounter as a mixed couple. Max seems like a nice person, but are you really prepared for the whispers and stares when you walk down the street?"

  "And what about your children?" Papa asked, almost in a whisper. It seemed as if he'd lost his voice. He paced back and forth in front of the fireplace. "It's a difficult enough world, but to be caught between two cultures..."

  "Just means they'll be blessed with twice as much," I finished his sentence.

  "I don't suppose he's Catholic," Mama added. "What will Father Shaunnessy say?"

  "His parents might be asking what their Buddhist reverend will say."

  "Don't be sarcastic, Caterina," my father snapped. "I don't think you have any idea what you're getting into!"

  They tried to bribe me with all the things they equated with an easier life — a new car, a trip abroad, an apartment of my own, money for graduate school. I found my voice and raised it just enough to make them realize I meant what I said. "I love you both, but I'm marrying Max, with or without your blessing!"

  Max had been met with an anxious silence from his parents. There were no big scenes or loud words, just a weary acceptance of the fact that life was once again throwing them a curveball.

  "They wanted to know why I couldn't just marry a nice Japanese girl." Max laughed into the phone from L.A.

  "And what did you say?" I asked, gripping the receiver tighter.

  "That I was marrying a nice Italian girl instead."

  Mortified, my parents refused to attend our wedding. Their good Catholic daughter had gone astray at last, and they couldn't understand how or why.

  Before we were married, Max and I talked about where we should live. He suggested we return to California. "There's an opening in the history department at Brandon College, up north, near the coast. It's roughly three hours from San Francisco. I'm sure you'll like it, it's beautiful country up there. The only skyscrapers are the redwoods. And we can make a fresh start on our own."

  I had imagined that we would move to San Francisco or Los Angeles, to be near Max's parents. "It might be easier if we moved to a bigger city," I said, though I knew it was just as much for my sake as his. I knew the big cities might be more accepting — there were large Japanese communities thriving in both places and I'd thought we'd be accepted as a couple there. But unlike Tag, who had found a real satisfaction in growing flowers in the safe confines of his family's glass houses, Max wanted to be in open spaces and to be near the ocean. He couldn't wait to get as far away as he could from the arid Southern California climate. Max was still that little boy back in the camp who couldn't stop moving.

  "In Wyoming," he had told me once, "our camp was surrounded by desert, and in the distance, there was the towering presence of Heart Mountain. Someone said it was over eight thousand feet tall. I looked out at it every morning and imagined it was a limestone monster that stood guard over us, never letting us leave."

  I felt guilty then, realizing my parents were right. I felt ashamed of wanting to escape what people might say when they saw us together. And all Max wanted was to leave the past behind, to be far away from arid Los Angeles and parched Heart Mountain. He had always dreamed of being near the ocean, feeling the moist salt air against his skin, breathing in the briny scent of the sea. It was the freedom he had longed for, ever since he was a boy at Heart Mountain.

  Max shook his head
. "We don't need it to be easier, we need to build a new life. Our life."

  Thank God I was too ashamed ever to say anything to him about my own fears. We moved to Daring, California, during the summer of 1959. It was as beautiful as Max said, with Victorian and brown-shingled houses, a river that ran under a stone bridge in the middle of the town, its bank thick with acacia and evergreen trees, and a main street lined with weathered stone buildings. And we were so close to the coast you could smell the ocean, and on foggy days, taste the salt in the thick moisture.

  In September, Max started teaching at Brandon College right in town. It was then a small, private college with a growing student body and a faculty that included a handful of minorities. Brandon put the town of Daring on the map. We rented a small, one-bedroom bungalow within walking distance of the campus. While Max prepared his syllabi for the history classes he'd be teaching, I unpacked and tried hard to make our small house a comfortable home.

  "What's this?" I asked Max one afternoon when I opened a box in the living room. He sat at our makeshift dining room table, a piece of plywood balanced between two stools. I held up a black-and-white porcelain vase, which had the clean strokes of a black crane painted on it.

  Max glanced over. "The crane is a symbol of good fortune. At Japanese weddings, friends and relatives fold a thousand origami cranes for the bride and groom. My mother wanted us to have it."

  There we were, all alone, starting our life in a remote town, hours away from any big city. We were surrounded by the sea and giant redwoods. We had a statue of the Virgin Mary from my mother and a Japanese porcelain vase with a crane that meant good fortune from Max's mother. I followed the outlines of the crane with my finger for any extra luck it might bring us.