A Girl Like You (4 page)

“I don’t want any of you, that’s for sure.”

“Who says we’re asking?”

“Oh, you’re asking.”

She and Artie figure big in the schoolyard gossip. Her reputation is taking a hit, while his remains intact. She may have Jap in her, but she’s a looker, and he’s just doing what guys do.

“They think they know what’s going on,” she tells Lily. “Boy, do they have vivid imaginations.”

“Can’t blame ’em for getting ideas,” Lily says caustically. “You and Artie gotta be getting up to something in those woods.”

“Yeah, swimming and smoking.” She grins. “Real wicked, eh?”

These days, though, when Artie puts his hand up her skirt, she lets it wander until it reaches the soft skin at the top of her thigh, lets him pull a little on the leg elastic of her panties. The sense she has that she might be carried away and let it happen feels dangerous and exciting.

“Don’t be a tease, Sati, nobody likes a tease,” Artie pants.

“I’m not teasing, I’m serious.”

“I’m serious too, pretty damn serious.”

“Pretty damn serious, pretty damn serious,” she mimics, until, red in the face, Artie rolls sulkily away from her.

“I don’t know what makes you think you’re so fine. I could have any girl I want, you know?”

She guesses it’s the truth. He’s a charmer for sure. A charmer with a rolling swagger, and the sort of hard body that stirs up girls’ insides, gives them that dull ache.

“Think yourself lucky, Sati,” he says. “You’ve got your drawback, that’s for sure. I’m out on a limb, with you for a sweetheart.”

Despite Artie’s misgivings, he is relieved and a little alarmed when on her fifteenth birthday she accepts his class ring. You can never be sure how Sati will react to things. That day, though, as if she is rewarding him, she lets him unbutton her blouse and pull her brassiere straps down from her shoulders. She lets him cup her breasts with his farm-boy hands.

He closes his eyes, feeling as though he is sinking into himself, into a sweet safe place. It feels so good he could cry, but all he says is, “They’re great, really great.”

Letting Artie touch her bare breasts feels to her like giving a child one sweet too many. You feel generous and it keeps them quiet for a bit, but sugar gets them excited and you know you’ll pay for it later. For sure the more Artie gets, the more he wants.

She won’t tell Lily, no point in getting her in a stew. She’ll show her the ring and say it’s nothing serious. It’s going steady but just for now.

Artie, though, can’t keep his mouth shut. “You ain’t seen nothing like them,” he tells the boys. “Not a girl here to match them. Round and firm, and the scent of her like those big red apples. It’s enough to drive you nuts.”

“Hand her over when you’ve finished,” they joke crudely.

“She’s out of your league,” he boasts.

“Yeah, from another fuckin’ continent.”

Much as Artie thinks himself a catch, the big mover and shaker, his school reports confirm that he is lazy, middling at pretty much everything he takes on.

Artie’s trouble
, Mr. Beck writes in his neat handwriting,
is that he is ambitious without being dedicated. He expects things to be handed to him on a plate. He must learn that effort brings success, or he will continue to fail.

Artie laughs at the reports. What does a dried-up old guy like Mr. Beck know, anyway?

Mr. Beck, though, is a fine judge of boys, he knows what he’s talking about. Satomi too senses Artie’s weakness. He’s full of want, but too lazy to work at things.

“Life doesn’t owe you,” she says when Artie annoys her with his boasts, when he tells her what a big success he’s going to be once he gets to the city.

Artie’s all for getting out of Angelina. He wants the big city, the hustle and bustle, lights and music. He wants the chance of a life that doesn’t include dirt under his fingernails. And he wants the prize of Satomi Baker, wants her to give in, to go all the way. He feels lucky, he’s good looking with that “it” thing going on, life owes him, he’s just waiting for it to pay up.

Artie might not be Mr. Beck’s favorite, but he’s popular among
his classmates. In his sixteenth year, he’s the best-looking, the tallest, the funniest, the most popular. If his friends want him along, it means that Satomi comes too.

“See, Sati, whatever you say, you’re just as popular as me.”

“Oh, sure, Artie, course I am.”

But as cool as she likes to think herself about Artie, life is better with him than without. Him wanting her, when the girls who excluded her want him, makes a sort of balance. Even Lily’s jealousy, her little digs, can’t spoil the fun she has with Artie.

“Let’s not go to school today. I’ll write your note, you write mine.”

“Artie, it’ll be the third time this month. We won’t get away with it for much longer.”

“Who cares, we’ll be leaving soon anyway. You have to do what you want in life, enjoy it while you can.”

On their way to the woods they steal soft-shell peas from Cromer’s fields near the water hole, fruit from the orchards, sinking their teeth into ripe peaches, and the sweet red strawberries that set themselves at the woods’ edge. There is something of the waning summer in those fruits, something lush and fertile and close to decay.

“A smoke before or after?” Artie asks.

“After what, for heaven’s sake?”

“A swim, I suppose, after a swim.”

It’s Artie, not her, who squeals at their submersion into the cold river; Artie who won’t swim out to the deep because he might get caught up in the weeds that grow there. She can’t help but sneer as she grins and swims out past him.

“Chicken.”

“Fool.”

They smoke Lucky Strikes when they can get them, roll-ups when they can’t. She likes the roll-ups better. The ritual of opening
the little tin of tobacco, the crisp feel of the white tissue, the earthy smell as they light up, unclenches some tautness in her.

She knows what he means by “after,” of course. It’s what Lily with her mouth all twisted up calls “making out.”

“You’ll get yourself a reputation,” Lily warns. “You don’t want that, do you?”

“Thought I already had one.” Satomi winks at her outraged friend.

Much as Artie wants to be with her, he doesn’t care for the woods, they are too feral for his liking. He has a deep fear of snakes, of all wild things. The slightest rustle in the undergrowth has him jumping.

“No animals in the city,” he says. “Just jazz clubs and bars and the streets all lit up. And coffee shops on every corner and the latest movies, no measuring out the water, no having to eat the bruised crop that you can’t sell.”

“Yeah, I know, all the men are handsome and all the girls pretty and dressed up smart all the time,” she can’t help teasing him, even though the pictures Artie conjures up are exciting.

But Artie’s dreams are not hers. She hasn’t worked hers out yet. Unlike him, she loves the woods, the sweet green stillness of them, the strange shadows that play there, and the mossy scent that stays in the air for days after a storm. They are lovely to her in every season.

In her childhood years she had played in them, never afraid to be by herself under the lacy canopy of the tall ghost pines. She loves the way the light filters through their needles, the clean scent of them. And in winter, when the wind sweeps through their boughs, their creaking moans keep her from being lonely. Angelina’s woods hold only magic for her.

Once, at dusk, she had seen a fox in them. It had stood big as a dog, alert but motionless by the porcelainberry bush that was
hung with poisonous drupes. Its thick musky smell had come to her on the breeze before she saw it staring, working out whether she posed a threat or not. She had held the creature’s gaze with a pounding heart, the hairs on her arms standing on end, amazed and scared at its closeness. It had turned its head from her, sniffing the air, and then, looking back, had given her a wild stare before trotting away.

“Don’t mention it to your father,” Tamura advised. “He will want to shoot it, you will only get upset. He has to protect the chickens, of course, but …”

In the woods’ cool clearings she picks armfuls of the rough apple mint that grows around the base of the big sitting rocks and that must be strewn on the packing-shed floor to keep the rats out.

“Better mice than rats any day,” Aaron says.

And in the early morning when the light is new and the scent of the juniper like incense on the air, her mother sends her to pick mushrooms in their season. Tamura calls the little flesh-colored cups “
kinoko
,” the children of the trees.

Torn between love and embarrassment, Satomi secretly delights in her mother’s little sayings. In later years she will know that her heart lived in her mother, she will regret not having hugged to her childhood self the unique charm of Tamura.

All her life she will be drawn to woods, but none of them will ever quite match up to the fragrant forest of Angelina, where she and Artie practiced how to be grown-up together.

“You’re exotic, that’s what you are,” Artie says, as though complimenting her, as though isn’t he just the clever one to give that description to her.

Without knowing why, she doesn’t like the sound of “exotic.” The word has too much heat in it, a low sort of intimacy. It isn’t the first time she has been called that, and it doesn’t feel like flattery to her.

Mr. Beck, a man torn between duty and impropriety when it comes to Satomi, told her once that he found her exotic.

“Know what ‘exotic’ means, Satomi?”

“Different, I guess.”

“It means someone not native to a country. Someone poles apart from yourself.”

“I’m as American as you, Mr. Beck.”

“I meant it as a compliment, girl. Learn how to take a compliment.”

But she can’t take Mr. Beck’s advice seriously. It isn’t impartial, that’s for sure. For one thing, he is unreliable, one minute singling her out for his favors, the next picking on her for punishment. He trembles more than she does when giving her ten strokes on the palm of each hand, his odd smile disturbing her more than the pain he inflicts. He is always including himself in her world, flattering her, intervening in her fights, touching her. She wishes he would get off her case.

“You know, Satomi, you have a kinda disturbing beauty, the kind that could get you into trouble. It sure can open things up for you, but it can cut you out of them too. My advice to you would be to study hard, so that you aren’t tempted to rely on it.”

“Thanks, Mr. Beck, that’s good advice, I guess.”

But without effort she is always somewhere near the top of the class. English comes easy, but she wings her way in math, copying Lily’s neatly worked-out sums. Lily sure knows how to count.

“Why waste your time on schoolwork?” Artie says. “Your looks are as good as currency.”

She can’t see it herself. Some crooked thing inside won’t let her see it.

If mirrors could talk, hers would say,
This is who you are. You have your mother’s long eyes, only wider and a little lighter, more the color of the bark of the Bryony that grows wild by the sheds; your hair is long
and thick, and looks black unless you are standing next to your mother, where in the comparison it is dark, dark brown. You have your father’s lips, cushion-full and faintly tinted as though with salmonberry. And your skin, the color of white tea, is smooth and finely pored. Your flaws are the stubborn set to your mouth, that look of refusal that stalks your eyes.

If offered the choice, instead of her dark eyes, her mother’s smile, she would have chosen to look fuller, lush, and plumped up like those freckled Californian girls. A regular American.

“There are many different kinds of Americans,” Tamura says, catching sight of Satomi posing in front of the mirror, a yellow scarf draped as hair on her head. “Ask your Japanese friends at school. They are as American as your father, as Lily. We are all good Americans.”

She doesn’t have the heart to tell Tamura that she rarely speaks to the Japanese pupils. She doesn’t care to, and they don’t mix that much, don’t seek her out. Apart from Saturdays when she and Lily see them on their way to their Japanese-language lessons, they are rarely met outside of school. Even when the carnival came to town, when the Ferris wheel beckoned and the sweet smell of cotton candy got all jumbled up in your head with the fairground music and the strutting boys, they were nowhere to be seen.

In any case, Tamura herself hardly talks to the Japanese. She may give a greeting when she sees them in town, but she never stops to talk. It would be pointless making friends; Aaron wouldn’t like it, no matter if they are Japanese or not. Even on the rare occasions when Elena comes he is put in a bad mood for hours.

At school with Lily, Satomi talks the latest talk, chews gum, and thinks American thoughts. At home, in the vine-covered wooden house that sits back from the single-track road, a mile or so from town, there is no escaping the Japanese half of her. She knows the rules of both her worlds, moves between them with what seems like ease. Yet something in her struggles to find out
which life she is playacting. It never occurs to her that it might be both.

In their small community, the Bakers stand out. Feeling neither fish nor fowl, it’s hard to know where to place themselves. The Japanese feel uneasy with them, advise their children to keep their distance. They’ve heard the gossip, judge Satomi’s behavior as
haji.
She brings shame on her family, a thing not to be borne. They’re schooled in family loyalty over the individual, in ritualistic good manners, so obedience is second nature to them. What kind of girl goes alone to the river with a boy after all?

The whites made their judgments on the Bakers the moment they hit town. If anything, they have grown more suspicious of them, of Aaron in particular.

“I hear they eat raw fish. Snake too when they can get it.”

“It don’t seem natural somehow, marrying an Oriental. God only knows what goes on in that house, what kinda life an American has to live under that roof.”

“It makes me sick just thinking about it.”