A Girl Like You (30 page)

The spectacle of the ailing house is hard to look at. Her chest tightens with the memory of how it used to be. A sudden desperate longing for Tamura overtakes her.

There are cracks like lightning hits in the whitewashed windowpanes. All the frames are rotting away, and Aaron’s tough old enemy bindweed races up the smoke-blackened walls to the roof.
KEEP OUT. PRIVATE PROPERTY is splashed across the padlocked door in red paint.

“I could break the lock easy if you want, Sati.”

“Oh, Dr. Harper, I didn’t have you down as a housebreaker.” She gives him a tense smile. “I can get in through my bedroom window if I want. I’ve done it often enough before.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“There’s no hurry, Sati.” He doesn’t care about the dark coming now. “Take your time”

“Okay.”

At the back of the house she hunkers down by the kitchen door and smothers a wail. She doesn’t want to upset Dr. Harper. She thinks of what she has lost, what she can never get back. Her mother, she knows, would say different, she would say that she had a happy childhood and that can never be taken from her.

The kitchen door is padlocked like the front one, but no KEEP OUT warning. She doesn’t want to go inside; just standing in the yard is pain enough.

It’s a surprise to find Tamura’s henhouse still standing. No hens, the straw swept out, a few molding seeds set in the mud floor. A child’s basket stands rotting in one corner with peppercress growing through it, she doesn’t recognize it. How Tamura had loved her hens, those homely little things that she had thought beautiful. How she had cared for them.

Their packing sheds have been knocked down and replaced with long aluminum buildings. Neat piles of boxes stand around stamped with the United Farmers logo. A chemical smell hangs in the air; the place feels dead. The years of her father’s attention have been swallowed up, gone. Aaron’s passage through his land forgotten. There’s nothing left of him for her to see or touch or smell. Home is nowhere to be found on the ground here.

On her way back to the car she flips open the mailbox; it’s empty. A moment of disappointment connects her with her younger self, as though the place isn’t dead to her yet. How she had loved to find things there, seed catalogues, Aaron’s paper. She remembers the penciled note from Elena that had brought comfort to Tamura.

“I need to go back into Angelina. One more thing to do.”

“Sure, we should find a place to stay for the night anyway. It’s getting late.”

She looks at the white orb of the sun low in the sky, a rising slice of moon already visible. She remembers how the sun takes its time here, dunking its way down into the woods before dropping out of sight. They have twenty minutes at least before dark, she guesses.

“I doubt anyone would give me a room in Angelina, Doctor.”

“Then we’ll drive to somewhere that has a better class of people.” He is angry on her behalf.

At the side door of the post office, Mr. Stedall, with his dog at his feet, is oiling the chain on his bike. It’s the same old bike, with its straight handlebars, the big bell that looks like a shiny hamburger. In his post office uniform Mr. Stedall looks the same too, a handsome man, she notices now, if you like thin. He smiles at her, anxious, bracing himself against life.

“Hello, Mr. Stedall. Remember me?”

“Satomi, isn’t it? How’s your mother?”

“She’s dead, Mr. Stedall. She died in Manzanar.”

“That’s too bad.” He looks crestfallen. “Nice woman, your mother.”

“Are the Kaplans still at their place? I’d like to send Elena a note.”

“He is. She died around the time you left.”

“Elena died?”

“Yep, one of those freak-type accidents. She fell and hit her head against their tractor. Never woke up.”

“I can’t believe it, Elena dead.”

“News to you, maybe; it’s an old sore to Hal, though. He grieved something terrible. I reckon he’ll never get over the shock of it.”

“Do you know, Mr. Stedall, I can’t help wondering sometimes if the devil lives in Angelina.”

“Can’t blame you for thinking it, Satomi.”

The Great Port

Southport Street

New York

Dearest Eriko,

Dr. Harper forwarded your letter and it has found me at last. He’s been such a good friend to me in so many ways that I wonder now why I was so hard on him in the camp. His letters come to me as if from home, just as yours did. I guess for me now home is not so much a place as the people I love.

I should have answered sooner but as you can see by the address I have left the West Coast behind me. Honestly, Eriko, it takes so much time to settle in this city, it’s a crazy place and it’s so big, I could never have imagined how big.

I was sorry to hear that Little Tokyo has changed so much and that the Negroes have taken it over. I know you hoped for familiar faces but I guess most inmates opted for relocation hoping for better things. You’ll make friends, though, I’m sure. We learned the lesson of getting along with each other well at Manzanar, didn’t we? If you can live alongside Mr. Sano you can live alongside anyone.

I can see you smiling as you read this thinking that most learned that lesson better than me. I guess I’ll never walk in
my mother’s shoes, that’s too much to hope for, but I’m trying.

The camps are never spoken of here. As far as New York is concerned they may never have happened. We Japanese are as much to blame for that as the government, there seems to be a conspiracy of silence among us. Why should we be ashamed, though?

It must be good to have your business back, even if as you say people only buy cheap cotton these days.

When I thanked Dr. Harper for helping me, for taking me back to Angelina, he said that it was the least he could do for Tamura’s daughter. He had tears in his eyes, Eriko, and his voice trembled. He said that he had been very fond of Tamura. I think that he loved her. I think that Dr. Harper is a romantic. He saw the girl in my mother from the start, the very thing I think my father loved in her too. Perhaps men are more romantic than women altogether.

It seems to me you have to be lucky to do well in New York, lucky to get a job, lucky to make friends, lucky not to be taken in by the “con men” that hover on every street corner. Dr. Harper’s cousin Edward warned me about them. He said to be careful or they would empty my purse before I knew it.

People here are infected with the “New York” bug. Everyone wants to get rich. I guess that dream makes New York what it is. People see what it has to offer and are ambitious for it. Edward says that there are more victims of hope here than in any other city in the world.

I don’t stand out here at all. Everyone seems to be a refugee of one sort or another. There are Japanese around, and lots of Chinese, and honestly I don’t think most people can tell the difference. I’m always being taken for Italian anyway. Still, I cherish my Japanese half, the half that makes me part of you.
I know now, though, that I will never be just right for everyone, none of us will. There’s nothing to be done about that.

I’m not sorry that I came here, although I can’t get used to the thin light or the small sky, and there’s too much concrete and not enough green. And you will find it strange that I miss the mountains. A part of me is forever spinning, not knowing quite how to settle. The contrast between here and the camp is extreme. It rocks me sometimes, but I’m not afraid. I know you can never be free of the past but I’m determined not to live off it, to make it an excuse for every bad thing that happens.

Today is a good day, but they are not all good. It’s odd to be lonely in a city teeming with people. For all the awful things about Manzanar, I don’t remember ever feeling lonely there. The other night from the harbor I heard the Queen Mary blow. It sounded marooned, just like me.

When I first arrived I stayed with Dr. Harper’s cousin and his wife. They have a tiny apartment and I had to sleep on an “Easy” bed in their sitting room, which was fine for me but not so nice for them I imagine. Being childless they weren’t used to sharing their small space. They tried not to show it but I think that they were uneasy with me there. I moved a couple of weeks ago into a small room of my own—I have a gas ring and a sink and a bed that drops down from a cupboard. Luxury.

There’s no rationing here, you can even get steak if you have the money. I long sometimes though for miso and, oddly, for mess-hall rice.

My room has a window looking onto a brick wall. It’s dark but it’s better I suppose than peering into someone else’s apartment. My neighbor in the room next door, Mrs. Copeland, is very old, eighty perhaps. She has a sharp tongue but manages to be charming. She won’t take a shower until I
return from work. “Listen out for me, darling,” she says. “I’ll die in that shower one day.”

She has no family here but is well known in the neighborhood. I only see old people in this building. I’m pretty sure I must be its youngest resident.

Dr. Harper’s cousin got me a job in their local library unpacking and putting out the new books. The good thing about that job was all the books I got to read without it costing me a cent.

I have taken a job now in the cloakroom of the Clare House Museum. It’s known for its collection of Flemish paintings, and it has two galleries full of French porcelain. Are you used to using china again now?

This job pays more than the library one, but I’m not sure that it’s a step up. I take in hats and hang up coats all day long. Sometimes it feels like I am hiding in my cubicle, keeping myself from the world. See, I am not as brave as I would like you to believe. But I get to see the art, and the director, a man who goes around straightening pictures and looking for dust, although I guess he has more important things to do, says that he likes my look and my manner, and that he is sure my fluency in Japanese can be put to good use. “But Japanese,” he says, screwing up his face. “Are we ready to hear it?”

Are you wondering about Cora? I think of her all the time. I’m still angry that they wouldn’t let me have her. It would have been hard but I think we could have managed. What should I do, Eriko? What can I do about that? I don’t suppose you have heard anything? Dr. Harper is trying to find out where she is so that I can write to her. You would think that he was asking them to disclose a state secret, but as he says, the likelihood is that they don’t know where she is and can’t be bothered to find out. I long to know how she is doing, and
I watch for the mail and hope. Please look out for her. You never know, it’s possible she could turn up somewhere in Little Tokyo.

It made me smile to hear that Yumi is getting hard to handle. I miss her naughtiness, the way she laughs that cheeky laugh and you have to forgive her everything. Children of the camp are bound to be unruly, I think.

I’m not at all surprised that Haru has become a hero. He always gives the best of himself. I read that his combat unit was among the bravest, the most decorated of them all. And Ralph too, so brave that they gave him the Bronze Star for bravery in combat. Was it Manzanar that made them so strong, do you think?

Please give my love to your mother, and to Yumi, and my best wishes to Haru.

I miss you all, Eriko.

Satomi

The air in her apartment building smells bad, a stale, ever-present, meaty sort of odor. It’s the first thing to assail the senses on entering the building, before the crumbling walls and scuffed floors meet the eye.

“It’s the stench of poverty,” Mrs. Copeland says. “I’ve lived here for twenty years and I’ll never get used to it.”

“I know of worse, Mrs Copeland. But it sure is unpleasant.”

“Well, be like me, darling, plan to get yourself a rich man and move on.” Her laugh is not without bitterness.

Mrs. Copeland calls herself “a woman of independent means.” It’s her way of describing how she struggles to live off the diminishing capital from the sale of her small dress shop that she retired from seven years before the war.

She is curious about Satomi, about the American internment camps, horrified at the idea of them. She couldn’t believe what went on in them at first, but now she is angry on Satomi’s behalf, appalled that it’s not only Germany to be condemned.

“A black mark against us,” she says. “Such a tragedy, for you to have lost your mother there.”

She is mourning herself, for her German cousins, the last of her known family, whom she hasn’t heard from in years.

“They must be lost, like all those others,” she says. “I’ll probably never know what happened to them.”

As old as she is, Mrs. Copeland volunteers at the local refugee center twice a week, helping in the kitchen, handing out secondhand clothes, pinning up the lists of people looking for their relatives. You never know, someone might turn up there who knows of her cousins, and what else is she to do with her time anyway?

“And your Cora,” she says to Satomi. “Your hope is realistic. Keep your spirits up, there’s a chance you’ll find her.”

To counteract the smell in her building, Satomi scents her room with the cheap bleach she buys at the big Woolworth’s store a block from her building. She cleans like a demon these days in a way that would amaze and please Tamura. Her room has become her refuge from the city, a place where she doesn’t have to be on alert. In its shabby confines she can let go of the confident show she puts on at work and in the subway, when the panic of being underground rattles her.

Like a true city girl, she jostles for space in the coffee shops with the best of them, shouting her order over the counters, where the help hardly ever return a smile. She is learning to be a New Yorker by pretending to be one. Life in the city is tricky, people move fast, have no patience, and she is always running to catch up, to wise up.

“Keep your foot hard down on the gas, it’s the only way,” Mrs. Copeland advises.

Her wages run out by Friday, so that she lives during the weekends on her last bit of bread, a smear of butter. And she has lost weight, so that she notices that she is skinnier than the better-fed New Yorkers she sees around her.