1001 Cranes (7 page)

“Gam-ba-roo?” I ask. It sounds like “kangaroo,” and I almost start to laugh.

“Your parents never talked to you about
gambaru
?”

I shake my head.

“
‘Gambaru’
means ‘to persevere.’ To hang in there. When everything looks bleak and rough, to charge ahead anyway.” Gramps pauses and I hear a weird knocking sound from his mouth. I know that it’s from his false teeth. When I was ten, I nearly died when I saw Gramps’s dentures floating in a glass of water in the bathroom. I’ve since gotten used to it. Gramps is still Gramps even without his real teeth. “Do you know what I’m saying, An-jay?”

I don’t answer. I don’t even nod. I don’t want to let what he’s saying soak in, because it would mean I would have to change. And that’s the last thing I want to do.

He turns and pats the top of my head, the crazy hair that’s sticking out on top of my pillow. There’s the flower smell again. “You’ll be all right. You’re tough. You’re like your mother, who’s like your grandma.”

I can’t imagine that I’m anything like either of them.

“I know you feel that everything’s been taken away from you. But you’ll get things back. It just won’t be quite like before. But it’ll still be good. Now, you sleep.”

Dreaming Dad

When I wake up the next day, my eyelids are quadruple-size. King-size. Supersize. I look like I’ve been stung by a bunch of killer bees.

I go to the kitchen to get some ice cubes to reduce the swelling. Grandma’s already there, washing some dishes.

“You now have your first one-thousand-and-one-cranes project,” she tells me. She looks at me face to face and doesn’t even acknowledge that my eyes are swollen shut. “Next door.”

“They’re married already.”

“It’s their wedding anniversary. Their fortieth. They came over this morning. Mrs. Oyama specifically asked for you to oversee the folding.”

“Me?”

“They want the family to be involved. The two
hakujin
daughters-in-law will be folding the cranes. You’ll be training them.”

“Can’t you just give them your booklet?”

Grandma doesn’t say anything and puts a dried plate away. I know that if Gramps was around, he would comment, “They’re
hakujin.
What do they know?”

“How about you? Aunt Janet?”

“I guess you made quite an impression on Mrs. Oyama.” Grandma dries the prongs of a fork with her dish towel. “They’ve invited you for dinner tomorrow to discuss the particulars.”

It is decided. I can’t argue. I spend the rest of the day icing my eyes and reading a manga that I brought with me. Nobody bothers me. Aunt Janet makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, covers it with a napkin, and leaves it on the dining room table.

Tonight my father calls my cell phone. I know it’s him even before I answer. I look at the digital screen, and sure enough, it says
DAD’S CELL
.

When I hear Dad’s voice, I feel not sad, but angry.

I let him stumble around trying to put awkward words together.

Finally, I whisper, “Why?”

“What, Angie? I can’t hear you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I left? I knew about the apartment. Your new landlady called.”

Silence. “That was wrong of me,” Dad says. “We should have talked it over before you left. I just didn’t want to make it harder for you to go to L.A.”

No, you didn’t want to make it harder for yourself, I think. “Why are you doing this?”

“Honey, it’s not anything I’m doing against you. Sometimes these things happen. This is between your mother and me. You never think something like this is going to happen. But things change; people change.”

“Was Mom nicer before?”

Dad then laughs. “No, she was the same
monku
girl the day I met her.” I can’t help smiling a little myself.

“Where are you living, Dad?”

“I’m in an apartment, just down the street.”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Well, it’s a studio. So I guess it’s zero bedrooms.”

I imagine Dad in his sweats, surrounded by brown boxes in his one-room apartment.

“You’ll be able to visit me anytime.”

“Can I come now? I won’t be any trouble. I can sleep in a sleeping bag, even.”

Dad is silent for a minute. “No. No, right now, it’s better if you’re with your grandparents.”

“How about Jii-chan and Baa-chan?” At least I would be closer to my house.

“No,” says Dad in his no-
monku
voice. “It’ll be better if you stay put. At least for now.”

So is this really it? The end of us? I want to fix it, to be the glue that fastens my parents together again. My heart starts to race. I try to say something but only manage a squeak.

“I know that you don’t understand, Angie, but none of this—none of it is your fault.”

I feel tears come to my eyes; I have a limitless supply of them. I wish tears were finite, like the water in a water bottle. I would be all dried up by now. “I don’t want to be alone, Daddy,” I finally say.

“You’ll never be alone, honey. You’ll always have me and your mother. And Jii-chan and Baa-chan, Grandma Michi and Gramps, Aunt Janet. We’ll always, always be there for you.”

I swallow a lump of air in my throat. When you swallow a cry like that, it feels good, at least in the short run.

I don’t hear what my dad says next. My dad is a dreamer. He dreams about buildings that don’t exist. He just imagines beams, walls, and roofs. He draws them from his mind. Other people do the messy work. I know because I’ve been on a construction site before. I’ve worn those funny hard hats and followed my dad over dirt and gravel. One time I overheard one construction worker say to another, “He’s crazy. It may work on a blueprint, but not in reality.” The other merely shrugged. He obviously agreed but didn’t care enough to voice his doubts.

“So what are your plans for tomorrow?” Dad asks.

“Not much,” I say. “Have to go next door for dinner.” I’m not looking forward to it, but I try to hold on to Gramps’s word:
gambaru.

No More Spam

As I sit at the Oyama family’s table the next evening, I wish for a moment that I was staying here instead of at my grandparents’. For one thing, all the furnishings have clean lines—no fancy scalloped edges or extras. I feel that my mind can relax; I don’t have to tie myself into knots to deflect all the physical chaos around me like at Grandma Michi’s house.

The other thing is the food. Instead of Spam with rice, spaghetti with a side of rice, or chili on rice, dinner is a salad with fresh tomatoes and bits of basil, straight from the garden, and chicken fajitas, steaming with fat slices of green pepper, onion, and tomato. Not one grain of rice in sight.

I’m a bottomless pit. My face doesn’t leave my plate. I keep scooping food into my mouth, my head down so I don’t have to join in their conversation, which is extremely fake polite—you know: the kind that dances like bubbles floating in the air and then pops into nothingness.

While they eat, they don’t watch cable news and call politicians idiots, like my mother sometimes does. And they don’t make comments about their neighbors or cutting remarks about white people. Of course, that really wouldn’t make any sense here.

There are six Oyamas around the rosewood dining table—Mrs. O, Mr. O, their two sons, and their white daughters-in-law. The two sons, Jack Jr. and Arthur, the younger one, are both engineers at different companies; Grandma Michi filled me in on that.

It has taken me a long time to understand what engineers do, and to be honest, I’m still not absolutely clear. When I was in elementary school, I always pictured an engineer wearing striped overalls, a puffy hat, and a red scarf around his neck and standing inside a locomotive. Emilie, whose father is an engineer, corrected me. She said that engineers sit at desks and design machines, work similar to an architect’s, only with moving parts. Driving a train seems so much more exciting.

Anyway, both of Mrs. O’s sons have the same kind of job. They even have similar short haircuts, although Jack Jr.’s hair is parted on the right; Arthur’s, the left. Neither is bad-looking for being kind of old, I guess. I mean, they’re not ugly, for sure. I like Arthur’s look a little better. He has thick, shaggy eyebrows like his father’s. He is a little less manicured, a little wild around the edges. Jack Jr., on the other hand, looks shiny and smooth, like someone scrubs him down every night.

Jack Jr.’s wife is Sarah, the woman I met outside the house; Arthur’s is Helen. Helen is a typical freckle-faced redhead, freckles on every exposed part of her body, from her eyelids to her earlobes. I love redheads and had a crush on one in my school in Mill Valley. He didn’t have the same feelings for Asian girls, I guess.

“Angela’s a pretty name,” Helen says, using that high-pitched voice adults reserve for children.

I’m in a bad mood and want just to concentrate on my food. “My parents named me after Angela Davis,” I say.

Helen then exchanges glances with her husband, and Sarah with hers. Obviously the Oyamas can’t relate to a former Black Panther who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List about the time I was born.

Mr. O seems to feel like he needs to dig into my background more. “What do your parents do?”

“My dad’s an architect. My mom is a lawyer. Just part-time.”

“So, not doing so bad for former radicals.” Mr. O smiles.

“My dad went to the Green Party convention last year. I walked the precinct with him.” I like the word “precinct.” It sounds very criminal.

Silence again. “The fajitas are good, Mom,” says Helen.

“Yes, real tender,” Sarah echoes.

All through the conversation, Mrs. O is quiet. I notice that she doesn’t eat much on her plate. She sits across the table from me and just stares. Everyone here seems to notice that I have somehow placed a spell on Mrs. O, and because of that, they are no doubt going to watch me very closely.

Dueling Daughters-in-law

After dinner, the men retreat to the living room for a baseball game on TV while the women take the dishes and the glasses to the kitchen. I stay in my chair, not quite sure where I belong.

“No, no, I got it,” Mrs. O says, shooing her daughters-in-law back into the living room. “You all have to start on our anniversary project.” She then nods at me, and I know that that is my cue to get the folding lessons started.

Grandma Michi has given me a fishing-tackle box filled with supplies. I take out two of her booklets and give one to each daughter-in-law.

“I better go wash my hands,” Sarah says after reading Michi’s Tip Number 1.

“I think my hands are clean enough.” Helen squeezes her freckled hands and smiles faintly at me.

When Sarah returns to the table, I notice that there is a coolness between the two women. They never seem to address each other directly and they keep their gazes on me.

Sarah is better at folding. It is obvious that she is good at following directions. “I did it.” She waves a completed crane and it is undeniable: she has scored an A on her first try.

Helen, on the other hand, struggles. You can see the white in all her folds, and when she’s done, the resulting paper structure looks more like a crushed Dixie cup than a bird.