A Girl Like You (39 page)

On Abe’s summer break, they go to Freeport. The heat is not so bad on the coast, there is always a breeze and the nights are cooler than in the city. Abe is happy there. So she is happy there.

They sail every day. He’s surprised how good she is at it.

“Captain and mate,” he says. “Not sure which of us is captain, though.”

She watches him raise the sail, admires the muscles in his tanned arms, the creases around his eyes as he squints in the sunlight. Love and lust collide and meld softly in her.

Anchored in port, he takes her on the cabin’s impossibly small bunk, still surprised that she is as eager for it as he is for her. They always end up in a heap on the floor, tangled in the cover.

“We’ll be black and blue all over if we don’t stop this.” She laughs. “Then what will Frances think?”

“Let’s never stop this, Sati, never, never.”

And after, beer straight from the bottle, hauled up from its net in the sea where Abe keeps it cooling. They play cards on deck with Wilson bunched up at their feet, snoring in his doggy sleep. They stay till dark, not wanting to share their time with anyone, not even Frances.

Abe introduces her to
his
Freeport, to the shopkeepers and the people who hunker down in the place after the tourists have gone. They are overly polite with her, cautious.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Abe says. “They don’t matter.”

Satomi is reminded of how hard it is to break into the circle. There have been so many circles in her life that she has skimmed around the edge of, never quite making it to the inside. Abe is the only one who sees her for who she is, who loves her because she is Satomi. Artie saw too much Japanese in her, Haru not enough. With Abe, though, she’s just right. Even if she never quite fits in with those others he loves, she’s inside the circle with him.

“It’s a different world in winter,” he tells her. “The sailing’s not so easy, but I like it better. You’ll see, you’ll love it in winter.”

They walk the canals and on through the fields of pure white salt marshes that open out to the clean Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Have you ever seen anywhere so beautiful?”

She thinks of Fishers Island, of Joseph’s sleek yacht
Windward
cutting through the gray-green ocean. Her first sight of it had taken her breath away.

“No, never, it’s just perfect,” she says.

He takes her to the Kissing Bridge over the Millburn but refuses to kiss her.

“I’ve kissed too many girls here,” he says seriously. “You’re not a bridge-kissing sort of girl, you’re for keeps.”

“Did you kiss Corrine here?”

“Oh, sure I did, her and a few others besides.”

They stroll along the Nautical Mile, where in the Crab Shack Abe’s friends, home for the summer, join them. Abe’s order is always the same, steamed clams and his favorite light beer, brought to the table in glass pitchers, the liquid trembling gold in the sunlight.

“Nothing like Freeport steamers,” he says.

It’s a pleasure he savors, dipping each one first into the clam broth, then into the little tin pot of melted butter that comes on the side.

Sitting next to him, with the sound of the gulls bullying, the warmth of his thigh against hers as he helps himself to her fries, Manzanar it seems to her was a time in the life of a different girl. Finding Cora is not so much forgotten as put on hold. It’s a honeymoon period for her and Abe. She is slipping into place, no longer defined by her experiences in the camp.

“I can’t believe that I have found you,” she says. “Just when I wasn’t looking.”

“It was meant,” he says simply.

Back in New York, the heat in mid-July is still fierce. Abe, after having her to himself in Freeport, is reluctant for her to contact Joseph.

“We have our life, honey. It just doesn’t fit with his.”

“I have to keep in touch with him, Abe. Asking me not to see Joseph is like me asking you not to see your mother. It’s cruel.”

Their first real argument, though, comes not over Joseph but about Satomi wanting to work.

“You didn’t mind living off Joseph’s money.” He would take the words back if he could. They are unfair and he knows the truth of it.

“I worked for most of the time I was with him,” she defends herself, hurt by Abe’s tone. “In any case, Abe, it’s not the same thing at all. I’m lonely here with you gone all day.”

“I don’t want you working, Sati,” he says flatly. “I can support my wife, I should think.”

When she greets him with the news that she’s taken a job, as a receptionist at the Bridge Hotel, near his hospital, a frown flits briefly across his brow before he raises his hands to heaven and gives in. She won’t be ordered, and he loves that about her. She can’t be anyone other than who she is.

“I don’t like you working, honey, but if it’s what you want …”

“You’ll hardly notice it, Abe. And it’s not forever. Just until we settle, start a family.”

The words “settle,” “start a family” wrap themselves around her. They’re imbued with warmth, with normality. She likes that the language of her world has changed to that of the all-American girl.

Joseph comes to the hotel, winces at the sight of her behind the desk, at the cheap plastic name badge on her dress. His face is a little drawn. He is a few pounds lighter than when she last saw him. He has had trouble finding the hotel, since the cab dropped him on the wrong street. He walked three blocks out of his way before discovering the mistake.

She has no name for the sweet feeling that floods her at the
sight of him. Perhaps it’s what a sister would feel after not seeing a loved brother for a while.

“God, you look healthy,” he says. “But I can’t say those clothes do much for you. You look like a schoolteacher.”

“I like this dress, its Abe’s favorite.”

“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Out of the Manhattan village, he’s a tree unearthed, too elegant for the sullied midtown territory that she now inhabits. His imported Savile Row suit is fine worsted wool, his soft brogues of obvious quality. He’s tanned from his European tour and it gives him a slightly racy look. She remembers the first time that she saw him and had thought him vain. She knows better now: his extreme neatness is his shield, the meniscus he puts between himself and the world.

“I’m getting used to life without you, I suppose.” He sighs. “But New York is not the same. I need pastures new, feel the urge to be off again.”

Since her wedding he has been working on the Cora thing. No news yet, but he gives her his latest report, all neatly typed up. Families who have adopted Japanese children have been contacted, there are letters from the governor’s office with assurances that they will search records but can promise nothing. It’s suggested that they should look farther afield, out of the state if need be.

“Anything from Dr. Harper?” he asks.

“Nothing, only that he thinks her name might have been changed, as he can’t find a record anywhere of any Cora. It’s as though she has disappeared from the world.”

“She’ll turn up, dear girl.” He touches her cheek lightly. “Oh, and believe it or not, Hunter is getting married. A Connecticut family, one of the Harrison girls, Laura. You met her on Fishers Island, remember? She’s been sweet on him since they were kids. His family is pleased.”

“I’m pleased too. Lucky girl, to have Hunter.”

“You’ll come to the wedding, of course?”

“Well, it’s not Abe’s sort of thing, and he doesn’t like me going places without him.” She can feel herself blushing.

“And what Abe says, goes?”

“Do you really think I’ve changed that much?”

“Well, I live in hope that you haven’t. You look the same, although rather like a rare orchid in a tin can behind that desk. It’s quite upsetting. Let me take you to lunch.”

“Okay, I’d like that, but nowhere too smart. One of us has to look out of place, so it might as well be you. Somewhere that would suit a schoolteacher would be best, don’t you think?”

The offer of a job with the Long Island hospital group comes out of the blue and Abe jumps at the chance.

“We can live in Freeport, buy a house, have our babies. What do you say?”

He hadn’t needed to ask, they both knew the answer to that.

He would take up the position in December—time enough to pack up and give notice at the apartment, to honor his contract at the hospital, and for them to find a home of their own in Freeport.

“You can start looking for a house right away,” he says. “Give up your job and stay with Frances. She’ll love helping us find the right thing. I’ll come every spare moment I get.” He will miss her, but he will be sending her home, putting her somewhere safe, somewhere away from Joseph. The light of their future is beckoning, and he can’t wait to be done with the city.

“It’s a wonderful piece of luck, Sati.”

“So wonderful,” she agrees, even though she doesn’t want to leave. Joseph is hardly a threat, and she would rather stay with Abe in Queens until they are ready to move.

There is something confirming, though, in the idea of being in Abe’s childhood home, of finding a house of their own, waiting with his mother for him to return to them. Tamura had told her once that women must get used to waiting.

“Work and wars, Satomi,” she had said. “It’s the women who wait.”

In Abe’s childhood bed she wakes periodically through the night, gauging the time by the depth of darkness, the quality of the light seeping through the curtains from the sea. Will she ever be able to sleep comfortably on her own again?

In his boyhood room, full of boyish things that Frances can’t bear to get rid of, her clothes are squashed up tight against Abe’s outgrown ones in the small wardrobe. There are pictures of sailboats on the walls, balsa-wood planes hanging on strings from the ceiling, a baseball nestled in its glove on a shelf, as though waiting for Abe to pick up the game where he left it off.

Among the debris of his childhood there hardly seems room for her. A photograph of Wilson as a puppy, jumping for a ball, ears flying, jostles for space on the small bedside table alongside a picture book on sailing, and two huge pebbles with the faint tracery of fossils inking their surface. She puts the book and the stones in a box under his bed, and the well of her memory is taken to that other bed she put a box under all those years ago. Shoving aside his puzzles, the miniature tool set, and a browning pile of comics, she swallows hard and attempts to banish the memory of that day, of that Angelina girl.

“Move anything you like,” Frances had said lightly, but didn’t tell her where she might move it to.

When Abe comes on his precious time off, the bed is too narrow for the both of them. They lie knotted together, close and uncomfortable. He pretends not to mind, she does too.

“It’s cozy,” he says.

“Mmm.”

It’s nothing against Frances, but she feels stifled being in such close quarters with someone she hardly knows. There is something of camp living in it that unsettles her. And she has noticed how Abe becomes more of a son than a husband in his mother’s house. She misses having him to herself, misses the apartment. The need to find a place of their own is urgent in her.

“I’ll go with whatever you choose,” Abe says. “Long as it doesn’t break the bank.”

When she finds it on the fifth house viewed, it’s obvious to her that it’s the one. The day is dazzlingly bright, the noon sun high, the late summer day hot, yet the salt marshes on which the house sits appear to her like fields of pure untrodden snow.

“It looks solid enough,” Frances says, seeing Satomi’s delight.

It will blow their budget, so they will have to decorate it themselves, make do on the furnishings, but it’s perfect.

“Square-built. Nineteen twenties, I guess,” Frances says.

Satomi loves the unadorned frontage that belies the charm of its spacious interior. There isn’t much of a garden, but you can see the ocean from all sides, and the rooms are filled with light.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“A lot of upkeep,” Frances says. “And nothing much will take in the ground here. The salt, you see.”

When Abe comes home on the weekends their time is spent decorating, sanding down the woodwork, peeling off the dark wallpaper, painting the rooms in soft grays and blues, the colors of the ocean.

They make love on a blanket on the floor, the smell of paint and ozone mingling in the air. The urge, frequent and overwhelming, can’t be resisted.

“We’ll move in as soon as the bed comes,” Abe says. “What more do we need?”

“So many things.” She laughs, picturing them sleeping in a big comfortable bed with cotton covers, a crib by the side of it.

“We’ll be in by the end of the month,” he says, and kisses her. “Wish we could have Wilson with us here, but it wouldn’t be fair to take him.”

“A puppy of our own, then?” she suggests.

“I guess.”

The windows of the salt marsh house are open in the day to the tang of the marshes. There are drapes now at the windows, a sparse assortment of furniture in the rooms, and Frances has donated two rag rugs. The house has become a home.

There’s no picket fence around her salty garden, and she refuses to wear an apron, but she is assuming the identity of the suburban, middle-class American wife, loving it so much that Manzanar has retreated to the less conscious part of her mind. She is hit by the certainty of love, by the contrast of her life with Abe to the unreal time she had spent with Joseph.

She gets a card for the local library, does her marketing at the store that Frances shops in, even has a laundry day. Frances is teaching her to cook Abe’s favorite dishes, pickled beets and creamed codfish, broiled chicken and cornbread. People seeing her with Frances include her in their greeting, begin to recognize her when she is on her own. She sees the reserve in them still, but doesn’t mind so much. She believes Abe when he tells her it’s the same for all newcomers in Freeport. It takes time, that’s all.

“Before you know it,” Frances says, “you’ll be a local.”

They have Abe’s best friend, Don, and his girlfriend over for dinner, and Abe helps her roast a chicken and she attempts a pear pie. She’s a wife like any other. She’s happy.