Silver Like Dust (18 page)

He turned out to be a difficult roommate and an exacting partner. Compared to Obaachan’s father, whose quiet, calm ways had set the tone for their life on Pico Street and even in Pomona and Wyoming, Ojichan was a taxing, powerful force, who insisted that things go his way all the time. Although Papa had been the designated leader of the household, he would ask his wife for her opinion and would always act in her best interest. My grandfather, on the other hand, knew nothing of compromise and would raise his voice to drown out Obaachan’s if he felt he had a point to make. He refused to admit mistakes and ran circles around her with his affection for debate. He meddled in my grandmother’s chores and fussed about each and every task she took on. On more than one occasion, he followed her to the laundry room.

“When you press my shirts,” Ojichan would say, gripping the iron and tipping it toward his favorite light blue dress shirt, “only starch the front and the collar. The back doesn’t need starch. It’s a waste to spray it there.”

My grandmother wouldn’t argue.

“And when you iron the collar, you need to do it like this,” he would continue, again demonstrating. “Start on each end and meet in the middle. If there’s going to be a crease in the fabric, it should be in the back, where people are less likely to notice. I hate it when people have creases in their collars. It looks so sloppy.”

“Okay,” Obaachan would say, stealing a self-conscious glance around the room.

This was another one of my grandfather’s lessons. Although he often ironed his own shirts, he wanted to make sure Obaachan knew how to do it to his specifications—hence, the tutorial in the laundry room. Obaachan found the “lesson” demeaning and irritating: there were other women around, and who knew what they were thinking as they watched a husband teach his wife how to iron a shirt. No other husbands frequented the laundry room to give their wives ironing instructions. It was embarrassing. Obaachan felt as though every woman in that room must have deemed her incompetent. Of course, she’d learned to iron from her mother—Obaachan had, after all, been taking care of her family’s household duties for nearly a decade before she’d gotten married—but apparently her skills were not up to Ojichan’s standards.

“My Papa never made a big deal out of dress or appearance. He always looked nice, but he was not the type to fuss about creases or fashion or starch,” Obaachan explains, shaking her head. It did not take long for her to realize that the very thing she’d found attractive in my grandfather as a suitor—his style and handsome appearance—was maddening in a husband.

In Florida, Obaachan and I are returning from another radiation appointment. She must go five days a week for two months; she is now on her third week. On our way home, we swing by the supermarket, Publix. Today, she’s making subs for lunch, and we’re taking them to the beach because it’s the last day of my visit, and I’ve been wanting to go all week. As we walk through the store, Obaachan’s red purse is tucked carefully beneath her left arm. I was the one who taught her, she recently told me when I commented on it, that a handbag does not need to match an outfit perfectly. For a woman who rarely wears shades other than gray, blue, and white, the red purse is an unexpected splash of color.

“They make the best subs in South Jersey,” she remembers as we walk through the produce department of Publix. “Nothing compares.” After my grandparents were released from Heart Mountain, that’s where they moved, to the East Coast, to work at Seabrook Farms, a company that had recruited Japanese prisoners from the camps to join its workforce. They didn’t leave New Jersey until they were in their seventies, when they moved to Florida.

She inspects a vine-ripened tomato, gently pressing her fingertips against the skin. “Too bad my tomatoes aren’t ready yet.” She places the tomato in a clear plastic bag and drops it into the shopping cart. We gather up the rest of our ingredients, the thin-sliced baked ham, the salami, provolone, and sub rolls, and head home. In her kitchen Obaachan carefully assembles the sandwiches, using a brush to cover the rolls with olive oil and oregano. She packs them in her old blue-and-white cooler and adds two ice packs and two cans of Coke. “We don’t need potato chips, right?” she calls to me. I am searching her linen closet, near the front door, for two beach towels. “They’re unhealthy,” she adds. “And I don’t have any here.” She chuckles at the order of her own sentences. “I guess I shouldn’t have asked, huh? Since I have nothing to offer.”

“I don’t need chips,” I call to her loudly, turning to face the kitchen, so that she can hear with her one good ear. I roll up the towels I’ve grabbed from the linen closet and shove them into my small beach bag. I carry the first load of items to the car.

“We need the beach umbrella,” Obaachan yells from the house. “It’s in the corner, by Ojichan’s old work table. I can’t be in the sun,” she says. “I don’t take a sunbath like you.” I smile at the strange diction. Even though my grandmother has been speaking strictly English for decades, every once in a while she pieces sentences together in odd ways. I grab the umbrella and the two canvas beach chairs, place them in the trunk, then walk back to the house and tell her I’m ready. Obaachan stands in the doorway, her wide-brimmed white sunhat pulled low over her forehead. In the sunshine, her Transitions lenses grow darker.

At Satellite Beach we carry our things down the worn wooden steps to the sand and then set up the umbrella so that Obaachan can sit in complete shade. As with her diet and exercise, my grandmother is fastidious about sun exposure. She uses sunblock every day and wears a hat anytime she’s in the sun. It still seems strange to me that a person so conscientious about her health can be battling cancer. What makes my grandmother’s cancer even stranger is that she seems outwardly unaffected by it. In moments, I forget. In other moments, I am keenly aware that just a few months earlier, they found a lump in her breast during her annual exam, and that they dug the cells and flesh from her left side—that a small part of her has been removed.

Obaachan sorts through the cooler and hands me a sandwich. She takes out her own lunch, opens a napkin, and spreads it across her lap. “Shortly after we got married,” she says as she cracks open a Coke, “your grandfather came up with this idea that we had to have a wedding picture.”

Months after the actual ceremony, in the spring of 1943, my grandfather, following some sentimental impulse, announced that it was unacceptable that he and Obaachan lacked a formal wedding picture. He arranged to borrow an acquaintance’s camera, and informed my grandmother that she had to come up with a wedding gown for the photograph.

“We need something to show our children,” my grandfather insisted. “We can’t just tell them we got married in camp. They’ll want to see a picture of us. And we just won’t tell them that it was taken much later. They’ll assume it was taken on our wedding day, and we’ll let them assume that …”

My grandmother was resistant, disliking how contrived the whole thing was, but she was too nervous to go against her new husband’s wishes. She wrote her sister a letter asking to borrow her wedding dress—Sachiko had taken it to Arkansas with her—and when the gown arrived in the mail, Obaachan rolled her straight hair into pin curls, brushed on some rouge, slid on some red lipstick, and put on her sister’s gown. They were the same height and wore the same size, so the dress fit quite well.

“At the time, your grandfather was developing an interest in photography. If he could have done anything in the world he wanted, he would have been a professional photographer,” Obaachan says. She looks down, folds her hands at her waist. “But after the war—well—we all made sacrifices.” In their room at Heart Mountain, Ojichan set up a white sheet for the backdrop. He thought it through: the lighting, the pose, the angle. He was very meticulous about it. Obaachan smiles. “He wanted the memento to be perfect.”

Or
seem
perfect, I think to myself. Although I say nothing of this to Obaachan, I find my grandfather’s endeavor to capture his marriage like this both moving and troubling. I appreciate that he thought of his children, and grandchildren, and that he considered how one day that photograph would become a family relic. And yet, another part of me can’t help thinking of my grandfather’s careful reconstruction of his wedding day as some misguided attempt to make their history more palatable to us, more pleasant. Less a source of
haji
for everyone—but also less honest.

“He was a perfectionist,” Obaachan says, adjusting her chair so that it sinks deeper into the sand. “He wanted things to be done his way. He was also obsessed with hygiene. And he expected the same of me.” Once, on a hot summer day, he was walking beside her, and when he reached out and felt that her arm had grown sticky in the heat, he shuddered in disgust. You need to take a shower, he told her. You’re
neba-neba
. Sticky.

Obaachan shakes her head and smacks her lips. “His thinking was that if you sweat, your skin was no longer clean. And if it wasn’t clean, you needed to shower.” It was not unusual for my grandfather to shower and change clothes a couple times a day. His obsession with cleanliness must have become annoying pretty quickly, especially because laundry at Heart Mountain involved hauling the clothes, sheets, or towels to and from the public laundry room, a city block away. Plus, the everpresent dust made cleaning the room an almost futile endeavor.

“And he used to polish his shoes every afternoon.” Obaachan stretches out her legs and looks at her sneakers. Even at the beach, she does not wear sandals. They are not supportive enough for her feet, and she is too practical to choose style over comfort. “He was so obsessive about things,” she adds. “And there, with all that dust and snow, nobody cared. No one looked at your shoes. I wanted to ask him, ‘Who are you trying to impress anyway?’ We were prisoners, after all. But he would’ve been very upset if I had said that. He didn’t like smart remarks.” She rests her feet in the sand and looks out at the water. “I learned that the hard way,” she says.

They were talking about shoes. She had just returned from doing laundry, and as she stepped into the apartment, her arms loaded with Ojichan’s white shirts and a few of her own cotton blouses, my grandfather was polishing his shoes. He had his little stool on the ground and his box of polishes on the table, and he glanced up when she came to the door, not all the way up, but at her shoes.

“You need to polish those,” he said. It was a command, not an observation. “People will judge you by your shoes. I’ve told you that a hundred times before.” He continued rubbing the tip of his brown leather loafers, examining them closely, turning the shoe to check each angle for scuffs. His cigarette lay in the ashtray, a furl of smoke rising from its end.

“Oh, what do you care?” Obaachan said to him, under her breath, not looking at him. She marched the laundry over to the cots and dumped the shirts. She was tired and out of breath from the long walk, and she was not in the mood for lessons or antics. But as soon as she’d said it, she knew she’d made a mistake.

My grandfather flew into a fury. He stood up from the table, grabbed his box of polishes, and flung it across the room. Around he went, picking up any loose item he could get his hands on, heaving it against a wall. A newspaper fluttered apart. Obaachan’s mug crashed to the floor and shattered into hundreds of white shards. A library book thumped hideously against the wooden wall. She was speechless. If she had not been completely paralyzed with fear and shock, she would have offered an apology, but no words would form in her mouth. After a few moments, Ojichan headed for the door and walked out, slamming it with such force that the flimsy walls shook and Obaachan was sure the neighbors had paused to wonder what was going on. In the silence he left behind him, she at last found her breath and sighed. When she looked down, she saw that her hands were shaking against her dress. She never defied my grandfather again, she tells me—not for the rest of her life.

As my grandmother shares these pieces of her early months of marriage at Heart Mountain, I think about how the Obaachan I knew as a child stood in my grandfather’s shadow, head lowered, eyes turned down. How she never interrupted or corrected him, and how she moved about the house tending to her chores, in silence. Of course, her desire to appease my grandfather was no reason for her to keep her distance from us, but perhaps she simply learned not to encroach on his territory—in this case, playing with and teaching the grandchildren—in order to maintain harmony. As I learn more about their life together, I think I begin to understand why she didn’t mention her marriage as the thing that sustained her through the hardships of prison life. In those winter months of 1943, Obaachan must have hoped that getting married would somehow ease the pain of how much she had lost—the chance to attend college, the siblings who’d been scattered across the country. After all, most people get married with the anticipation that life will be relatively happy. Instead, my grandfather merely brought more demands and regulations. In a way, by getting married, my grandmother had only created another prison for herself.

The sun has shifted on Satellite Beach, and Obaachan reaches out and moves the position of the umbrella so that every inch of her body remains in the shade. A white-haired man has found a fishing spot nearby, closer to the water, and he sorts through his brown tackle box, pulls out a sinker, and opens a clear plastic container of squid. Watching him, Obaachan smiles.

“Your grandfather loved surf fishing,” she says. “Do you remember? Sometimes he would take your brother with him when the two of you visited. He knew your brother was like him, most alive at the shore, facing the water. He looked forward to taking him.” She smiles at the memory.

I remember those childhood trips to the beach: the tall rod plugged into the PVC pipe, shoved into the ground, and my grandfather, lanky and straight, standing beside it, his hand shading his eyes, squinting at the gleaming water. And my brother dashing up and down the shore, kicking the water, throwing shells at the gulls that swept close enough to be a temptation. Ojichan would watch the rod’s end as it dipped and danced with the waves. He knew enough about angling and the ocean to sense when it was a fish latching onto the bait, and when it was just the undertow tugging at the line.