Southland (4 page)
It was strange to be in here, and she wasn’t sure that she could stay for very long. The room was small and, as always, impeccably neat. The single bed, pushed up under the window, was carefully made. There was a dresser against one wall and a desk against the other, on top of which sat the Macintosh computer. There were two pieces of art in the room—a large painting of a feudal Japanese home with a garden and carp pool in front of it, and a smaller, simpler painting of a single tree, its branches drooping gracefully like the arms of a tired dancer. Both paintings were the work of Frank’s grandmother, Jackie’s great-great grandmother, who had been a minor artist in Japan. Jackie’s eyes passed over these things without really seeing them, but then she noticed something hanging off the back of the desk chair. It was a blue Dodgers cap, well-worn, the lid bent slightly in the middle. Jackie remembered when he bought it—at a Dodgers game he took her to when she was seven. He’d bought her one, too, but she’d outgrown it; she had no idea now where it was. She walked over to the chair and took the cap off carefully, bringing it up to her nose. It smelled like him—soap and grass and Old Spice, with a touch of stale tobacco. Jackie felt a strange sensation in her chest and stomach—a combination of the warmth she got from a shot of whiskey and the pang she felt when she hadn’t eaten all day. What caused this, more than the smell of her grandfather, or even the cap itself, was the casual way it had been thrown on the back of the chair. Everything else in the room was neat and orderly. But the cap had simply been tossed there, as if her grandfather had just stepped out and would return at any moment.
She sat down in his desk chair, thinking again about the funeral—about all the mourners, like Loda Thomas, and her sense that the man they were paying respects to was different than the one she’d grown up with. Or maybe he
wasn’t
different with everyone else; maybe she’d just never bothered to know him. Not once had she asked him a meaningful question—about his thoughts or experiences, successes or failures, anything. And not once had she asked about the people in his life, so that the men and women she’d seen in the church that day, black and Japanese, had been totally new to her, as mysterious and undelineated as the acquaintances of a stranger. And yet they all knew
him
, and his family. She remembered sitting in the crematorium after the funeral, the strange intimacy between all the people there. It was the same room she and her family had waited in six years before, when her grandmother died. On that occasion, the staff had brought out a tray like a giant baking sheet full of still-hot ashes, dotted here and there with small charred bones, the perfect white kernels of teeth. Frank had started the ritual passing of bones, picking the larger fragments out with a pair of special chopsticks, passing them chopstick-to-chopstick to Rose, who passed them to Lois—spirit to body to dust. Once, years before in a restaurant, Rose had violently slapped the chopsticks out of Jackie’s hand when she’d used them to offer a piece of fish to her father. She never explained why, and when the connection finally hit Jackie, at Mary Sakai’s cremation, it was
that
more than the handling of her grandmother’s bones that made her hug herself and rock back and forth. This time, though, there had been no picking through the remains; her mother hadn’t wanted it, and Jackie was glad. She sat silently, staring at the wall as if she could see through it, and imagined the glasses melting, the gold wedding band, flames consuming flesh. Her eyes had settled on the odd old man across from her who’d sat through the entire service mumbling to himself, and then, when she and Lois approached him after it was over, had jumped to his feet instantly, spry as a spaniel, and offered a gorgeous, right-angled salute. She’d looked over at Burt Hara, the Buddhist priest from the Tara Estates who Frank sometimes played cards with; he’d just given Lois a thick wooden tablet with Chinese characters, the Buddhist name conferred to Frank upon his death. When the black-tied employee came out and handed Rose a simple bronze urn, Jackie wondered only what had happened to the bones and teeth. Rose handed the urn to Lois, who wrapped it in a purple
furoshiki
and set it down on the table. Burt Hara stood over it and said a few words in Japanese. And then everyone there, even, shockingly, both of Jackie’s parents, began to cry in earnest—everyone, that is, except for Jackie. The odd saluting man exploded with great gulping sobs; her mother just covered her face. She felt awful then—for not feeling more; for not sharing in their sorrow; for having been so distant from Frank, by the end, that she couldn’t even properly grieve.
But there was nothing, she thought, as she sat at his desk, that she could do about that failure. One tangible thing she could accomplish right now, however, was to grapple with America Online, and so she reached out and switched on the Mac. AOL, she knew, would keep billing her grandfather endlessly unless she canceled the account; her aunt was smart to want to cut them off now. She double-clicked on the AOL icon, double-clicked again. The dialogue box gave her the user’s screen name, “FSakai.” Now she needed the password. She paused for a moment. Baseball, his biggest love, was the obvious answer. She tried “Dodger,” then “Koufax,” then “Drysdale.” Who else had he admired? She tried “Dusty,” “Fernando,” and “homerun.” She thought about Japanese ballplayers—would he use a player from the Japanese leagues? She didn’t think so. Then she recalled a player that he’d mentioned as being half-Asian, whose name she remembered because she thought it so funny, and she typed “Darling” very quickly and hit “return.” The modem dialed, whirred, connected. Something flashed on and off the screen. She was in.
A tinny, cheerful voice welcomed her and informed her, “You’ve got mail!” She’d just intended to log on long enough to cancel his membership, but now she decided to read the new mail. It must have been written around the time he died, and she wondered who it was from. She felt vaguely invasive. Once, when she’d worked for an accountant in high school, she’d had to go through the checkbook of a woman who’d recently died. The barely dried ink there, the woman’s belief, in writing the checks, that she’d be around to cover them, had spooked and saddened her, as Frank’s mail did now. When she went to open it, though, she found that it was only something from the people at America Online. She was half-disappointed, half-relieved. Then, since she was there already, she decided to look at his file of outgoing mail. The results were boring—the most recent mail had all gone out to her. She felt another stab of guilt—she hadn’t answered his last few messages—so to counteract it, she did something worse. Curious about who her grandfather corresponded with, she opened up his address file—the only addresses there belonged to Jackie, Lois, Rose, and Ted. This couldn’t be, she thought; these were probably just the addresses he happened to keep on file. She closed that box and pulled up his older mail. The only messages were from her and her aunt and Ted. And there weren’t very many. Not, anyway, in comparison to the number of messages he’d sent to
them
—she opened his “sent mail” file again and saw that the list of outgoing messages was about four times as long. She couldn’t bear to look at this. She hadn’t returned his calls; had forgotten his last two birthdays; had only responded to a fraction of his emails. She hung her head for a moment and, looking back at the screen, finally began to sense the loneliness of the man who used to sit where she sat now.
Feeling something strong and definite for the first time since the funeral—shame—she thought that what her aunt wished her to do, while foolish, wasn’t really so hard. Maybe Frank
had
wanted all that money to go to the man in the will; who was she to say? Tracking him down was the least she could do—for everyone. And she could spend the day with her aunt, too, like Lois always wanted her to—she could blow off her schoolwork for once and go look at this house with them. Sighing, she turned off the computer and went back out to the living room, where Lois and Ted, red pens in hand, were circling more ads. The business card was still lying untouched on top of the box of money; Jackie picked it up and slipped it into her wallet.
“So I’ll give Loda Thomas a call on Monday,” she said, as nonchalantly as she could.
Lois smiled, and Jackie knew that
she
knew that something had happened in the bedroom. But she didn’t ask about it; she just said, “Thank you.”
S
HE SAW him everywhere, at different ages, in different incarnations. It was like the soundless scenes played at the end of certain movies, flashing on and off the screen while the credits rolled. Today the scenes starred Jackie as tiny granddaughter, maybe because Lois had spent the whole day with her, like they used to with Frank twenty years ago, afternoons and outings and dinners at home that her niece didn’t even remember.
But Lois did. Small snippets of memory, like cut-up film. Frank handing out cigars when Jackie was born, laughing aloud and then suddenly weeping, as if he already knew she’d be his only grandchild. Frank stomping around the house in Gardena, roaring, pretending he was a monster, waggling his sawed-off foot or half-finger in Jackie’s face. Frank and Jackie in the bowling alley, he encouraging her as she squatted behind the heavy ball, pushed it with both hands, jumped up and down as she watched it roll right into the gutter. Frank and Jackie a couple of years later, leaning over the railing at the Redondo Beach Pier. She was riding on his shoulders, legs hooked over his chest, fingers trying to get a hold in his crew-cut hair. He with his sun-browned hands wrapped around each of her legs. Lois beside them getting nervous as Frank leaned over the railing to watch a fish flipping on someone’s hook, her niece draped over his head, hanging, tipping out over the water. Lois yelled, “Dad!” and then felt silly as he stood up straight, snapped the child back onto the pier, saying, “What?” And then they’d fished, the three of them, sitting in lawn chairs and holding the bamboo poles that Frank had made himself, nodding them up and down, back and forth, like divining rods. Jackie’s mother was in medical school then, her father already a doctor, so it often fell to Frank or Lois—who was slowly finishing college—to take care of Rose’s child. To try and show her something different from the gilded, tree-lined world they both knew she was going to grow up in.
Lois remembered the day her family had divided. Looking back, she could see that it had been happening for years, but one Saturday morning in 1963, each member of the family had fallen clearly in one direction or the other.
She was twelve years old, and her older sister was playing for the under-fifteen championship of the Japanese Tennis League. Lois—who was in charge of equipment—had accidentally grabbed Rose’s practice shoes before running out to the car; they looked the same as the ones her sister wore for matches. And later, as they pulled up to the tennis court in Gardena, Lois knew her whole family was mad at her. Rose would hardly look at her, hadn’t spoken since she’d flipped her ponytail in exasperation and cried, “Lo-is! How could you be so dumb!” Her mother had been tight-lipped, informing her, simply, “This is a very important match, Lois. I hope you didn’t ruin it for your sister.” Even her grandmother Sakai, who never yelled at anyone, still added to the general air of disapproval. Only her father had refrained from scolding her, trying instead to mollify his eldest, telling her the practice shoes weren’t really that much older; their traction should be fine on the nice new court.
Although Lois felt bad about the shoes and wished that someone would talk to her, she wasn’t worried about how her sister would do in the match. She didn’t care much for tennis. She hated the bright white skirts, the pressed blouses, the scrubbed-clean quality of all the girls who played. And she hated leaving Crenshaw to come down to Gardena, where everyone lived in big, bland houses; where all the boys her age were already talking about college and becoming doctors, and all the girls spoke of make-up tips and Barbie dolls. After their father parked the car, Rose ran off to talk to some girls she knew. Their mother’s parents lived here in Gardena now—they’d closed the restaurant in Little Tokyo and opened another one over on Western—and the whole family came down to visit often enough for Rose to make some new friends. Her sister wanted to move here, Lois knew; every weekend her Gardena friends would pick her up in their cars, and Rose always returned from these excursions sighing and sad, looking out the window for hours.
Lois, her parents, and her grandma Sakai found seats in the shiny aluminum stands. Frank and Mary exchanged pleasantries with some other parents they knew, including Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda, the parents of Stephanie Ikeda, the girl Rose would be facing in the championship. Mary put the red and white cooler of
sushi
on the bench between herself and Lois, and Lois looked at it, stomach rumbling. The big Japanese-style picnic which followed these matches was the only thing that made them bearable.
“I wish you would take up tennis,” Mary said. “Or bowling. Something where you’d make some good friends.”
“I
have
friends,” Lois replied, thinking of Chris, with the gap where his tooth had been punched out, and Janie, with the always-skinned knees.
“Yes, but they’re not
nice
friends.”
Lois sighed. She’d heard all of this before. At twelve, she was a tomboy, usually outside and almost always dirty. To her, the greatest joy in life was running loose in the neighborhood. She loved the Crenshaw district, and she loved her father’s stories about how much it had changed over the years, since the time it was known as Angeles Mesa. It was filled with houses now, and crowded with all different sorts of families. But Frank described a neighborhood of huge, open spaces; of fewer and heartier people. For Lois, going down to Gardena, which was stiff and all-Japanese, was like going to church—something she knew she should do and appreciate, but which bored her to the point of sleep.
After an interminable warm-up period, a short man wearing a golf visor introduced the two players and everyone in the crowd clapped politely. The match began. Rose seemed nervous at first, and Lois feared she was distracted by the fit of her shoes, but then she settled in, as she always did, placing the ball perfectly on almost every shot. It was so quiet that Lois could hear the creak of a swing set on the other side of the park, chain links shifting and straining. Every time Stephanie Ikeda hit the ball, she emitted a small grunt, like she’d been punched in the stomach, and Lois saw her own mother shake her head a little, glad
her
daughter didn’t make such ugly noises. The whole crowd cheered when a point was won, and Rose took the first set in half an hour.
At the break, the people in the stands started into a quiet chatter, analyzing the first set, debating a questionable call made by one of the judges. Lois saw the gray clouds moving over them, closing and unclosing like fists, and she wondered if it was going to start raining. Her parents exchanged a few words and then fell silent again, and Lois thought, watching them, not for the first time, that she never wanted to marry. Marriage, to her, meant what her parents had—steadiness, like a small efficient business. Her parents never fought, but they didn’t hug either, or talk about anything that wasn’t related to the family or work. She knew that love could be more than that—more like Christy Hara and John Oyama from high school, who would vanish into Christy’s house in the afternoon and come out an hour later looking happy and relaxed; or like Dexter Coleman’s parents, who lived together but had never married, and who still cooked for each other, and sang songs together, and yelled, “Hey, baby!” when they met on the street.
Steadiness, in any form, was stifling to her. She liked the extreme, the inexplicable, the ridiculous and evil. She liked her Grandma and Grandpa Takayas’ stories of the hustlers and pimps they served in the old days in Little Tokyo; of the gambling house where they wouldn’t let Mary make deliveries because of the desperate, devious men and shady women. She liked their stories of nine-month winters and planting rice on early mornings in Japan, and her grandmother Sakai’s tales of surviving on locusts, fried for crispness or boiled for soup. They were citizens now, all of them, transformed into Americans at the mass naturalization ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in ’54, but to Lois their stories of old Japan were like the best kind of fairy tales—fantastical, with familiar elements and odd but recognizable characters.
During the second set, Lois’s attention wandered. She looked around at all the well-dressed husbands and wives, the tiny grandmothers with their plain, drab Western clothes and their bright, patterned Japanese fans. She watched a couple of bored-looking wives glance over at her father, who she knew was handsomer than any Gardena man. A better father, too, she believed. He was at the store every night until eight or nine, but then he was always at home, telling stories, teasing his daughters, never going out for drinks or card games like the other Nisei fathers she knew. He even took her to baseball games sometimes at Dodger Stadium, and before that, when the team had just moved out from Brooklyn, right over at the Olympic Coliseum. Rose, of course, wasn’t interested in baseball, but once or twice a summer, Frank and his friend Victor gathered a big group of kids and drove them all up to a game. Lois loved being around the men, for any reason—the deep sweet smell of Victor’s pipe, the easy way her father laughed when they sat on the stoop of Victor’s house, always made her feel secure. The two of them together were a sight to see, especially her father’s friend—all the women in the neighborhood, from fifteen to fifty, threw more sway in their hips, more spice and honey in their voices, when Victor Conway came around.
At the break between the second and third sets—Stephanie Ikeda had taken the second set 6-3—Lois asked her mother where the bathroom was. Mary pointed at a small tan building about a hundred feet away from the court. “Can’t you wait?” she asked. Lois said that she couldn’t. “Hurry back,” her mother said.
Lois barely made it to the bathroom in time, and when she was done, she had no desire to get back to the stands. So she dawdled, distracted by a game of volleyball; by a picnic; by a particularly proud and vocal robin. Every so often she looked over at the tennis court and saw the slim white-clad bodies flitting around on the sea-green concrete. When she was about thirty feet away, a small golden puppy came up to her, dragging a leather leash. Lois crouched down to greet her. The dog jumped up, put its front paws on her shoulders, and thoroughly washed her face with its tongue. The owner appeared soon after and disengaged the leash, saying that Lois could play with her for a while. So Lois skipped around, leading the dog in a circle, pretending it was hers. She could hear the announcer over at the court saying the set was tied 5-5. Lois knew she should see the end of the match, so she started back over to the court, but the puppy, ignoring its owner, continued to follow her. Then the dog caught sight of the tennis ball. Rose was bouncing it, preparing to serve, and the puppy, following some ancient, blood-deep impulse, took off toward the court at a sprint. “Wait!” Lois yelled after her, but it was Rose who turned, upon completing her serve, and so she completely missed her opponent’s return. Worse, the ball skittered off her end of the court and the puppy pounced on it, growling happily. The entire crowd burst into laughter. Rose went after her, but the dog commenced a game of keep-away, getting close to Rose, then jumping back again, Rose lunging in desperation. The crowd continued to laugh, and Rose to chase, until finally the owner appeared and grabbed the dog by the collar. He pried the ball loose from the puppy’s jaws and handed it sheepishly back to Rose. She grimaced at the thing, which was now covered with dirt and saliva, and then glared at Lois, who was standing to the side of the crowd, trying hard to disappear. Rose went back to the court, took out a new ball, and attempted to regain her composure, and the crowd’s laughter quieted down to a still-amused titter. The last point had put Rose down 30-40, and now, distracted, she double-faulted. It was 5-6. Stephanie Ikeda had serve, and Rose never recovered. She dropped the last game, love-40, and lost the match in three sets.
On the car ride home, Lois slumped in the back seat and suffered yet another berating from her sister and mother. Rose was almost hysterical, complaining to her parents about how Lois was a brat, and a bad student, and she was trying to ruin her life, and Mary scolded Lois for spoiling her sister’s day. Lois felt small, the bad daughter. Even her grandmother refused to look at her. But then, in the middle of this barrage, she caught Frank’s eye in the rearview mirror. He’d laughed right along with the rest of the crowd when the puppy went after the ball. Now Lois saw that his eyes were still laughing, despite his immobile face. He looked at her in the rearview mirror, not adding to the din of voices. Then he winked. And in that moment, as they drove up Crenshaw and back toward their house, although she didn’t say anything or even return the gesture, she felt the weight of everyone else’s fury lift off her, and became her father’s child.