Silver Like Dust (25 page)

My mother seems surprised, confused by my strong reaction. Twenty years ago, my aunt and her husband purchased the house in Florida and generously allowed my grandparents to live there, free of charge. When my Ojichan passed away, my grandmother remained in the house. My aunt and uncle have never lived in Florida and never intended to; they own homes in Hawaii and Colorado and live in Alaska. Since they’ve never been short on money, I don’t understand why they’re selling Obaachan’s home—why she has to move. At her age, I fear, packing up and relocating will be a great strain.

“They’re downsizing,” my mother says with a shrug. “The insurance, what with all the hurricanes … it’s just not possible for them to keep the place in Florida.” She studies my face. “They’ve put the house in Honolulu on the market as well. They want to simplify.”

I frown. Is there something else going on that my mother’s just not telling me? Can’t something be done to avoid this? Might the rest of the family pitch in to cover expenses? But I know better than to voice my concerns to my mother. She possesses a strange, unrelenting forgiveness toward her sister’s actions—Charlotte can do no wrong in her eyes—and if I push her, she’ll let me know, as she has before, that I rank below my aunt in her hierarchy of favorites. Deciding to keep my mouth shut, I shuffle outside to the deck at the back of the house and close the glass door behind me.

My father is seated on a white plastic chair, reading a Terry C. Johnston Western, his feet propped up on another white chair, a mug of beer on the table beside him. He looks up, moves his feet as an invitation to join him, and takes off his reading glasses. He never needed glasses until recently, and he still feels embarrassed about wearing them in front of people, even though I think they look distinguished and have told him so.

“Did Mom tell you about Obaachan?” I say, flinging myself into the chair and slumping. “About her house?” (I’m aware that it’s not really her house, which is precisely the problem—and yet it
is
her house, which is the point.)

He nods, taking a sip of beer, looking at me, his eyes blue and earnest in the September sunlight. He knows what’s on my mind, understands that I’m concerned about Obaachan. He leans back in his chair and places his book on the table, still says nothing. The breeze picks up and the sea of poppies beside the deck sways, their furry stems lifting.

“I mean, Mom doesn’t even seem concerned—she doesn’t even seem
aware
of what this means for Obaachan. She told me like it was good news or something. Where’s Obaachan going to go? What’s she going to do? She’s eighty-six. It’s her
home
.”

My father shakes his head and looks down. “I stay out of it,” he says with a shrug. It’s not his business, not his mother, not his sister, not his family. He understands my mother and her siblings are not interested in how he perceives the situation. (My guess is that he, too, knows where he stands in the hierarchy.) “But it’s a shame to see her … displaced … again,” he adds, folding his hands in his lap.

“Yes. Displaced is the word, exactly.”

At Heart Mountain, my grandparents struggled to adjust to life with a newborn in that small, dingy room. After a twelve-day stint in the hospital, Obaachan headed home to Block 17. With those thin walls that didn’t reach the ceiling, my grandmother must have cringed every time the small boy cried—everyone else in the barrack would have heard it, would have woken up with each feeding and discomfort, as she had, with all the other children who shared their building. My grandmother has always been extraordinarily sensitive to how her actions are perceived by others. She tries her best not to inconvenience or bother people. Once, she told me that people don’t like it when old folks run their errands in the evenings. “Old people should go out during the day, so that working people aren’t held up,” she explained. “We’re too slow.” At least that’s what she had read in a series of editorials in the local newspaper. And after learning that she might be disturbing the routines of some of her fellow Floridians, she made sure that she ran all of her errands during the workday hours. In the close quarters at Heart Mountain, however, there was no such flexibility to accommodate the desires of others. Obaachan simply had to do the best she could.

In her weak condition, Obaachan’s mother would not have been able to help with little Charles. On occasion, Obaachan took him to visit her mother, sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in the hospital. Mama certainly would have appreciated seeing her grandson, even though she couldn’t interact much. “She was in and out of the hospital at Heart Mountain,” Obaachan has told me. “She would be there for a few days, or a couple of weeks, and then she would be sent home for awhile. But as time passed, she was in the hospital more and more.”

However, to my grandmother’s surprise—and, I must admit, to my own—Ojichan was very hands-on and helpful with the baby. Although I understood as a kid that my grandfather loved children, playing with them is certainly different from helping to care for them. Plus, in a time when family roles were strictly delineated, when men were not expected to help with children or house upkeep, Ojichan changed diapers, walked the baby around the room when he was fussy, and doted on his every move. Years later, when my aunt, mother, and uncle came along, Ojichan played with them, romping around on the floor, just as he did with us grandchildren. Before he became ill with pulmonary fibrosis, Ojichan was always the fun grandfather—the one who took my brother fishing, walked the exercise trails with us, and quizzed us on our times tables. We adored him and knew we could always count on him to transform a boring afternoon into an adventure.

As his illness grew more and more debilitating, his tolerance for our antics waned a bit. By the time I turned thirteen, his jovial manner had changed. “Open the window and turn on the fan,” he commanded my brother when he used the bathroom. “Let it run for fifteen minutes. I need the cleanest air possible.” In his final years, Ojichan spent most of his time in the tan recliner my grandmother had bought for him, his oxygen tank constantly at his side, the plastic tubes hanging from his nostrils. His face, once handsome and lively, swelled to almost twice its original size. Still, even in those years when he was dying, his hair remained dark, thick, and wavy.

When he passed away, I was on a weekend retreat with a school program, and my mother called to tell me that she was flying to Florida to be with her family and to toss my grandfather’s ashes into the Atlantic. My brother and I were not asked to go. I felt little emotion then, with my sixteen-year-old view of the world and its giving and taking. “He was old,” I said to myself. (He was actually only seventy-five, so he wasn’t that old, really.) “And they all knew he was sick.” Surely my mother and her family were not so naïve as to think he might miraculously recover from the pulmonary fibrosis. After all, he’d lived for almost two years beyond what the doctors had predicted.

As a teenager I didn’t see my grandfather’s death from my mother’s perspective, as one losing a father, or from Obaachan’s perspective, as a woman losing her husband of over fifty years. Even though my grandfather had moments when he must have been nearly intolerable as a spouse—he was demanding, particular, and sometimes severe—he was still very much a part of my grandmother’s existence. Having married so young, and having spent their first years as a couple imprisoned, they shared a deep bond, one that could only be formed after experiencing five decades together. Neither one seemed to believe in having friends. They were friendly toward their neighbors, said hello if they passed on the street, knew people’s names on their block, but never arranged times to meet for dinner, go out for a round of golf, play bridge, or anything like that. The two of them were one another’s primary companions. When they retired to Florida, they drove to a nearby fitness trail early each morning, before the weather grew too hot, and exercised together. They kept track of their progress on a chart on a small clipboard: their balance abilities, how long they could hang on the metal bar, how far they walked.

In those early years in Florida, before Ojichan got sick, my brother, mom, and I joined my grandparents on these morning trips when we visited. What I remember most distinctly is their persistent warnings about the deadly fire ants. “Don’t go anywhere near those mounds,” my grandfather warned, pointing to one of the tiny hills the fire ants had built. He was referring to the red fire ants that were introduced to the state from Brazil. Nonnative species, the ants both sting and bite, and they are notoriously aggressive. Aware of my brother’s deep curiosity about insects, Ojichan worked to instill a strong fear of the ants in both of us. “They’ll attack you,” he warned. “The whole colony. They’ll cover you and they can kill you.” This was of course an exaggeration, an example of my grandfather’s flare for the dramatic, but at the time I was terrified. Having been stung by hornets at the age of three, I had no desire to have a run-in with the stinging and biting red ants, and made sure to keep myself—and my little brother—away from them. Even as an adult, I’m careful not to make the mistake of stepping into a colony of those ants.

At Heart Mountain, my grandmother found herself growing restless in that tiny room.

“I couldn’t stand it any longer,” she has told me many times, with the same look of frustration, her eyes squinting, her mouth pursed in disgust. “I just couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

Despite her parents’ many lessons on seeing the good in every situation, after two years in Wyoming, Obaachan could no longer force herself to believe that those good things were enough. When she imagined her son spending his childhood at Heart Mountain, going to school with all the other war babies, graduating, and then finding some menial work around camp, as my grandfather and Obaachan’s Papa had been forced to do—when she pictured him living forever inside barbed wire, she shuddered. She wanted her son to have the opportunity to walk the streets of a town somewhere, to have meals at a kitchen table with family rather than in a mess hall crammed with strangers. She wanted him to go to a real school where there were not only Japanese students who had grown up in an internment camp. She hoped that he might know what it was like to buy an ice-cream cone and eat it in the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon. She wanted something better than what Heart Mountain could offer.

And it was not only for her son that my grandmother was anxious. She began to resent the sameness in all the faces, the dark hair and eyes, and even more so, in all the thinking. “
Shikataganai
,” everybody would say with a shrug of their shoulders.
You cannot change the conditions of your life, so just accept them.
She grew fed up with this pervasive apathy that seemed to infect everyone, the depression, the looks on people’s faces that announced they’d given up.

And yet, my grandmother had not resisted or complained either. She, too, was stuck in a pit of indifference, and she knew it. There were those who protested their subjugation, those infamous No-No Boys, who answered “no” to two important questions on their loyalty questionnaires, plus other “troublemakers” who were sent to Tule Lake, or federal prison. And in January of 1944, when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had ruled that Japanese Americans were eligible for the draft, some young men rebelled by refusing to serve in the armed forces of a government that imprisoned them and their families. In fact, sixty-three Heart Mountain men were convicted and sentenced by a Wyoming judge to three years in a federal penitentiary for draft resistance. As a person who had been raised with an emphasis on obeying the rules, though, my grandmother never would have opposed the U.S. government, at least not openly. Doing so would have felt like a direct defiance to Mama and Papa, like she was turning her back on everything they stood for. Of course, she was probably frightened, too. She could not afford to be sent away, away from Charles, Ojichan, Papa, and Mama, even out of principle.

And so as 1944 passed slowly, once again Obaachan absorbed herself in novels, hauling my infant uncle to the library, exchanging one book for another. As the September snow began to fall and the boy’s feeding schedule stretched to every three hours, she found that she could almost enjoy the stillness of afternoons in her small room. Ojichan stoked the coal stove in the mornings before he left for work, and after Charles had fallen asleep, she would pull her cot toward the stove, bury herself beneath the army-issued wool blanket, and read. In books, she could enjoy the illusion of being someone else, in another time, another country, another world. She was not in Wyoming, trapped by long lines of fence and surrounded by an endless brown expanse. Instead, she was Jane Eyre coming back to find Mr. Rochester, pitying his blindness and loving him more than before. She was Elizabeth Bennet, discovering the true nature of the elusive Mr. Darcy. She was anyone but herself.

But changes, my grandmother would soon realize, could come as unexpectedly as a Wyoming storm. One moment, not a cloud could be seen in the sky; the next moment, ominous thunder echoed across the plains. One moment, she was chatting with friends on the front steps of her family’s church; the next moment, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the world into a frenzy. One moment, she was in despair about spending her life at Heart Mountain; the next moment, she and Ojichan were hastily making arrangements to leave.

It was a chilly afternoon in the fall of 1944 when my grandfather arrived at their room in Block 17, breathless, full of excitement. There was a posting, he explained to Obaachan, on the bulletin board at the community center. There were job openings for young, able-bodied people willing to leave Heart Mountain. “A man has a factory, a farm and factory, actually, and he’s willing to relocate people from the camps to come and work for him. He’ll provide housing, plus we’ll be paid.” Most importantly, the three of them could leave Heart Mountain, its short but stifling summers; its white, tiring winters; the lack of privacy; the rumors and gossip. He would not have had to explain all of this to my grandmother. She knew this was an opportunity to leave and finally have a chance to live their lives on their own terms.