A Girl Like You (17 page)

“We’re friends, Haru. We think alike. He agrees that America has betrayed its Japanese citizens. Unlike Dr. Harper, I didn’t hear you complaining when they spoke of sterilizing us.”

“There are fools in every government,” he says, more to console himself than to placate her. “It was never going to happen.”

Their neighbor Mr. Sano, with his usual lack of tact, has an unpopular take on the sterilization threat.

“I can see the sense in it. Just look at the Hamadas,” he declares, referring to the family of nine from the row behind Sewer Alley. “Mrs. Hamada is pregnant again. The children run wild, disturbing everyone. If they can’t control themselves, it should be done for them.”

Tamura and Eriko look at him with mouths open.

“He is blind to his own faults,” Tamura says.

“A disgrace,” says Naomi.

Along with Eriko, Tamura takes a camp job sewing camouflage for the Army. She is paid six dollars a month, which, added to the prisoners’ clothing allowance of three dollars and sixty cents, allows her to order little things from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

“You shouldn’t be working in that drafty old hangar, Mama. It’s not good for you. The dust from the cotton isn’t giving your cough a chance.”

“But I enjoy it, Satomi. I like the company, and it’s fun. And anyway, what would I do all day otherwise? Besides, we need the money. You must have cotton for your dresses, thread and needles for me to sew them with.”

At quiet times they go together to the mess hall and pore over the wonderful things the catalogue has to offer. Flower-printed head scarves, the prettiest shoes, silky nylons with straight dark seams, and pink suspender belts with rubber clasps that look like the teats from babies’ bottles. The most popular items are the short white socks that are fashionable among the older girls, who think they look neat with their black oxfords. Satomi, though, prefers in summer to wear her oxfords without socks, and she likes simple skirts, the plain white T-shirts from the boys’ section.

“No wonder the girls think you’re odd,” Tamura despairs.

Yumi, sparing no one her sulks, refuses to speak to Eriko until she agrees that she can give up the gray socks of the younger children and buy two pairs of the white ones.

“What can I do?” Eriko says. “She won’t even listen to Haru.”

“It’s just a phase,” Tamura says.

“Did Satomi go through it?”

“Sometimes, Eriko, it seems like she was born going through it. I can’t say that she has ever been an easy child.”

“She’s not a child anymore, Tamura. I’d give up hoping, if I were you.”

Eriko is used to hard work and enjoys the company too. She could have taken more pleasure in it if it hadn’t been for having to kneel on the cement floor all day, which makes her knees ache.

“You are the only one not working,” Tamura complains to Satomi. “All you do is read Haru’s books and talk to Dr. Harper. No wonder you are bored. Work would console you.”

“I won’t do anything here that helps them, Mama. Nobody should. In any case, I am not bored, I love reading.”

“You could help Haru with his volunteer work,” Tamura persists. “Anyone can see how much pride he takes in it.”

Haru has found his vocation and is teaching reading to the third-grade children. He coaches the softball team and helps distribute the care packages that come from the Quakers. Tin toys for the children, comics and pencils, and sometimes soft blanket-stitched scarves and hats.

Yumi was hoping for bobby pins, a watch, perhaps; instead she receives a fan made from cedar wood, which she hangs on the wall by her bed. She pretends that it is a silly thing of no use to anyone, but she keeps it free from dust so that it won’t lose its scent, and no one but her is allowed to touch it.

Haru, a little embarrassed at the Quakers’ charity, takes pleasure at least in the children’s joy at receiving the toys. He could have earned eight dollars a month if he had wanted, laying drainage pipes around the camp, but he has his pride.

“It’s insulting. Eight dollars! What other Americans would work for that kind of money? They would be paid ten times more.” He may be loyal to America, but like Aaron he is not to be predicted.

“I’d have thought you would be happy to help, since you love America so much,” Satomi teases.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sati. Loving America and working for less than a citizen is not the same thing at all.”

Yumi is at the camp school, and old Naomi Okihiro knits when she can get the wool, or sleeps her days away, dreaming of sunlit rooms and the plum tree she sat under as a child in Japan. Her English is not good, her nature suspicious, and, apart from Tamura and Satomi, she rarely speaks to anyone outside of her family.

Satomi won’t admit it, but Tamura is right, the days are long and she is bored. They would be longer, though, if it hadn’t been for Haru’s books, for Dr. Harper’s company.

Dr. Harper is taking up more and more of her time. He encourages her to call at his office, is debating with himself whether to take her on his rounds. The thing about Satomi is that she’s not hampered by the cultural manners that keep his other patients from challenging him, from having the intimacy with them that he would like. And she must have somewhere useful to place her outrage, after all, some outlet for the kindness she smothers.

He questions her about the minutia of things that go on in the camp that he would otherwise have no way of finding out, listing them in his journal meticulously.
Liver served for five days on the trot
, he writes.
On the whole the Japanese don’t eat liver.

“My little archive,” he says. “A gateway to memory for me, when Manzanar is over and you are all allowed to go home.”

He is attached to his collection, to the grim photos he has taken of the sparsely furnished, poorly lit barracks, the portraits of the inmates, who smile for the camera and manage to look hopeful. He has blurry pictures of rats on the run in the latrines, bugs in the children’s beds. He has drawings that the children at school
have drawn in the dust; strange shapes, and trees without leaves, and guards with guns, stick men smaller than their weapons. He treasures the little carvings people give him in gratitude for his skills, naïve ironwood netsuke, hares and rabbits, rats with serpent tails, infants tumbling together with stones for eyes. It’s a strange archive, but so potent that sometimes when he goes through it he imagines he can smell the camp, sweat and disease, dust and blood, and the burning reek of carbolic.

In his determination to let nothing of Manzanar be lost, he sees purpose in his job, and is able to keep faith with his country. There will be others like him, he thinks, Americans who witness the unfairness, the damage done. Others who, when the time is right, will work for recompense, for justice. He believes that Satomi will be one of them.

“You never stop writing in that thing,” his wife complains. “I think you find that place more interesting than real life.”

He doesn’t challenge her on the “real life” thing, prefers to keep Manzanar, the revulsion it holds for him, from her. “Someone has to keep a record,” he says. “I don’t want to forget the truth of it.”

Medical Rounds

“I suspected that she wouldn’t go full term,” Dr. Harper says to Satomi on their way to Mrs. Takei’s barrack. “The lining of her womb might as well be paper, it’s so thin with child-bearing. If it’s what I suspect, it won’t be a pretty sight, Satomi. You don’t have to come in.”

“I’ll come in,” she says nervously.

He’s burdening her, he knows, putting her to the test, but then we are all put to the test and he doesn’t want to allow her the getout clause of ignorance. It’s right that she should see things for what they are, right that she should be good and mad about it, and she’s strong enough for the truth.

He’s strong enough too, yet still he would like himself to be saved from the horrors that he sees, the ones that rob him of the free will to live a conventional, untroubled life.

Satomi hasn’t visited this part of the camp before. It’s the outer circle of the site, the periphery line of barracks that are the border between civilization and the rude acres of sagebrush. The barracks here take the full force of the winds, of all the extreme forms of weather their desert-floor home throws at them

“The badlands,” Dr. Harper calls them. “Home to the stragglers, latecomers too shocked at the sight of Manzanar to push their way to the front of the lines.”

Mrs. Takei’s barrack is fourth from the end. Her husband is sitting on the steps with their children, seven boys who look to Satomi to be about the same age, although that can’t be so. Their mother must have popped them out with hardly a space in between.

Mr. Takei stands when he sees them, stepping aside to allow them to climb the steps, bowing to them as though they are royalty. Dr. Harper puts his hand on the man’s shoulder and sighs. The men look at each other with what Satomi takes to be resignation.

Inside, it takes a second or two for their eyes to adjust in the stygian light. Mrs. Takei is perched on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin. Her face, Satomi thinks, as green as Palmolive soap. A dark stain pumps its way up the thin brown fabric of her dress, there’s a puddle of blood on the floor, streaks of it across her face where she has pushed her hair back with bloodied hands.

Satomi shuts her mouth and holds her nose, a brief protection against the offal smell that comes hot to her nostrils. An acid sharpness of vomit clots at the back of her throat and she swallows hard and prays not to be sick. The stench and the blood are shocking.

Even though Dr. Harper had been expecting it, he shakes his head at the sight of Mrs. Takei in such a poor state. It has always seemed a little miracle to him that the body’s odors are contained inside something as thin, as porous, as skin.

“When did the bleeding start?” he asks, easing Mrs. Takei gently down on the bed, straightening her legs.

“Last night.” She lowers her eyes from his.

“
Tshh
, and you’ve waited this long to send for me,” he says, not unkindly.

“The baby came quickly,” she says, looking to the corner of the room, where a bloody towel-wrapped bundle lays lifeless. “I thought the bleeding would stop, but it just keeps coming.”

“Water, please, Satomi. Lots of it, if you can manage, and the
cloths from my bag.” His movements are sure, his voice calm, his heart sinking.

Outside at the spigot, Satomi fills a thin tin bucket up to the worn part where holes pepper the sides, and gulps down the fresh air as if it were a long cool drink. She hesitates, not wanting to go back in, only moving when Dr. Harper calls her name urgently as though it is a question.

Inside, as the doctor is examining the dead baby, Satomi takes Mrs. Takei’s hand. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Takei,” she says. “About the baby, I mean.” She meant to sound sympathetic, warm, but her voice comes out small, useless.

Mrs. Takei takes two days to die. The blood transfusions Dr. Harper administers seem to pump in and flow out in equal measure. Mrs. Takei can’t hold on, either to the blood or to life.

She’s buried with her baby in her arms, leaving her husband and her seven boys to fend for themselves.

Satomi carries the vision of that desperate day, the blood and the brutal sight of the parceled infant, around with her for weeks. Forever after, the smell of blood makes her queasy, sets her heart racing.

On her rounds with Dr. Harper, one crisis runs into another so that faces blur, names are forgotten. There are cases of adult measles, strange fevers, and plenty of the geriatric pneumonia that Dr. Harper calls “the old man’s friend.”

“Speeds them along the path to meet their maker,” he says.

Mrs. Takei, though, stays in her mind with frightening clarity, as does the man with septicemia, who left untreated the cut he received from a broken pan in the latrines. By the time Dr. Harper got to him, you could feel the heat coming off his leg from a foot away. Thick pus oozed from the wound, and a long red line snaked up his skin from thigh to waist. In his spiking fever there
was no sense to be had from him. He was hallucinating, thrashing about, shouting warnings to the wall.

Dr. Harper got him into the camp hospital and set up twenty-four-hour nursing, but he couldn’t save him. The man’s blood was poisoned, his organs failed, and he died in agony.

“Just from a cut,” Satomi said to Dr. Harper in amazement.

“An easy route into the body for bacteria, Satomi.”

“Yes, but just from a cut.”

She wondered if the camp was the cause of the disasters, or whether such things happened in the world outside too. Perhaps she had just been unaware of them.

“It’s the same the world over,” Dr. Harper says. “It’s just that here the lack of facilities, the poor hygiene, turns sickness to tragedy more often.”

One case she knew that she could blame on the camp for sure was that of a boy a year or so younger than Haru. He had fallen into a depression and in his lowest moment had drunk industrial-strength chlorine, stolen from the mess hall while his mother was at work.

She had found him in agony, blisters the size of cookies around his mouth, his throat scorched from first swallowing the chlorine and then vomiting it up, so that he could hardly speak.

“He was always a happy boy before we came to this place,” his mother said bitterly. “He wanted to be a doctor like you, Dr. Harper. He likes helping people.”

“He still can be,” Dr. Harper assured her. “You must help him to look on the world as promising. Keep him from attempting anything like this again.”

“But he has spoiled his beautiful face. He will be scarred forever.”

Dr. Harper, usually good with words, could find none. It
would be more than a bit of scarring the boy would suffer. What was inside, what his mother couldn’t see, would be more of a problem.

“It’s this place,” Satomi hissed to Dr. Harper on their way out of the barrack. “This disgusting, filthy place.”

There have been days since that time when she can’t bring herself to accompany Dr. Harper on his rounds. Days when she just wants to forget other people’s troubles. Sometimes it’s more than she can manage to stay mad. She waits for Haru to return from work, losing herself in stories until he does. Books take her away from Manzanar, allow her to live other lives in her head for a while. And books are available to her now since the library has finally opened.