A Girl Like You (6 page)

In the fall of 1940, Aaron receives his draft registration card. He has been expecting it, and even in the face of Tamura’s apprehension he can’t get vexed about it.

“It ain’t gonna come to much, honey,” he assures her. “They’re just ratcheting up the numbers.”

Talk of a spat with Japan has been around for months, but Aaron thinks it’s all hot air. He reads the warmongering articles in the
Los Angeles Times
as though they are works of fiction, written to stir up the readers, to keep them buying the paper for the next thrilling installment.

“We’ll have to show them who’s boss pretty soon” is a regular brag in Angelina, but somehow Aaron’s imagination won’t stretch to the possibility of what might be heading his way. It’s hard for him to accept that something he hasn’t ordered himself might influence his life.

In Angelina, though, the moment those draft cards sat on mantelpieces, the Baker family took on the stink of the enemy. Try as they might to ignore it, the family couldn’t fail to notice the now-open hostility shown toward them.

“Something’s changed, that’s for sure,” Aaron says. “I notice they’re not turning our business away, though. They’re just a bunch
of hypocrites, always got to have someone to blame when things ain’t going their way.”

For Satomi the teasing at school has developed an uglier edge. Her fellow pupils strut around, mouthing off to her the things they have heard being said at home.

“Think we don’t know you’re a yella spy?” they taunt. “We don’t want your kind here.”

She fights her way through it. “As if I give a damn,” she says to Artie. “Sure, it’s tough, but not as tough as it is for the Japanese kids. They’re getting it bad.”

“We’re gonna whip you good,” the boys threaten them. “Don’t you Japs know you can’t beat Americans?”

“We are Americans.” But their words are drowned in waves of jeering laughter.

“Looking like the enemy doesn’t make them the enemy,” Satomi insists to Lily. “Don’t let me see you joining in the baiting.”

To her own surprise, coming across the school bully Mike Loder, who is twisting the arm of a Japanese girl who hasn’t made way for him in the hall, she finds herself ready, wanting to act.

Mike’s voice is high, pumped up with a venomous hatred. He is so full of himself that he might as well be thumping his chest with his fists.
Look at how important I am compared to you.

“Stand aside next time, Jap. Get it?” He is leering into the girl’s face, his own fat one shining with sweat and excitement.

“Why should she, Mike? You stand aside.” Satomi grabs at his shirt, pulling him away from the girl. “What’s so special about you?”

“Keep out of this. Keep your half-caste nose out of it.” He shoves her hard so that she stumbles, hitting the side of a locker, grazing her arm, and banging her cheekbone on its metal edge.

After, she can’t remember how it happened, what had propelled
her fist into Mike’s face, or the pain she felt when he returned the blow. She remembers, though, feeling good, not caring that she is in for it with Mr. Beck. Something about her action, her getting involved, has made her feel that she is safe in her own hands.

Aaron, checking the bruises on her cheek, the raw graze on her arm, says it’s no big deal.

“You’ve had worse,” he says. “Still, that kid needs a lesson.”

Next day she is embarrassed to see him at the school gates.

“Start walking home, girl. I’ll catch you up in the truck.”

Outside the gate she waits and sees him buttonhole Mike Loder, hears his voice steady and menacing.

“See this fist, boy?”

“Yes, Mr. Baker.” Mike’s pigeon eyes look wary, his voice little more than a squeak.

“You touch my girl again, any girl, you’re gonna see it close up.”

Mike hangs his head, studying the ground, shucking his foot against a broken bit of asphalt. He thinks he might just kick out, get a good hit at Old Man Baker’s shin before running off. He’s not sure he can pull that off, though, and he has had enough of mixing it with the Bakers.

“Tell your father to come and see me if he’s got a problem with that,” Aaron calls to Mike’s retreating back.

Hanging a left at the gate, Mike glares at her but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything at home either. His brothers would only sneer at him for letting a girl get a punch in.

Even Mr. Beck has caught the fear. “I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a war,” he tells the class. “But you don’t need to worry none. It won’t take long to see them off. We’ve got right on our side and no Japs are going to set foot on American soil.”

He attempts to keep his voice from shaking and fails. He is a
patriot, after all, and loves his country. “We all love America,” he says, not looking at Satomi’s bruised face, or at the Japanese students who sit in his class with blank expressions and lowered eyes.

“Guess Mr. Beck doesn’t like you so much anymore,” Lily whispers, hoping that soon it will be the same with Artie.

After his little speech, Mr. Beck keeps Satomi in with the pretense of talking to her about her grades.

“You have to understand,” he says, warily looking around before offering her a cigarette, staring at her in that squirm-making way. “You’re gonna have to choose where you stand. I’d cut any ties you have with the Japanese if I were you.”

She takes the cigarette and he lights it for her with a proprietary air. He’d like to be the one to always light her cigarettes.

“You want me to cut ties with my mother, Mr. Beck?”

“Well, no, of course I didn’t mean that. I just meant you should choose your friends carefully.”

“Are you my friend, Mr. Beck?” Her heartbeat amps up a notch, it seems too bold a thing to ask.

“I’d like to be.” He touches her cheek lightly, leaning in so that she can smell his sweat, see the moisture beading above his top lip.

“Well, if you are, then I reckon you shouldn’t make out like we’re the enemy.”

“We?”

“Us Japs.”

She’s judging him, ticking him off. He’s a little amused, stirred by her. It’s been a long time since a woman got pert with him. But he can’t favor her anymore, the time is coming when he will have to kill his desire for the girl, stop keeping her in his sights. She isn’t the only one who must choose who to play with.

As things worsen between the United States and Japan, Angelina closes ranks. What few friendships some of the locals have enjoyed
with their Japanese neighbors go stone cold, as though they had never been.

Tamura, painfully sensitive to people’s attitudes, refuses to go into town. She misses her outings with Satomi but she feels safer at home.

“I’ll go when things simmer down,” she promises. “No point in asking for trouble.”

While they wait for things to
simmer down
, Satomi picks up the provisions after school, not pausing for the grocery clerk to say thank you, which he rarely does, and then only when from habit it slips out. She stares down those who are rude to her, never the first to look away. She holds her head up at the overt name-calling, wanting to smash them all, to put her fists into their smug faces as she had into Mike Loder’s. She minds for herself, but cares more for her mother.

“Who in their right mind could think of my mother as the enemy?” she asks Lily. “I mean, Tamura Baker, Japanese spy, can you see it?”

“Well, I guess some might, not me, of course, but some,” Lily answers half heartedly. “I guess it’ll pass soon enough,” she adds without conviction.

“Can’t say it surprises me,” Aaron says. “It comes on the back of a century of hate for Orientals. They’re just plain scared, and now that Japan is playing up, they’re telling themselves that they were right all along.”

The Stars and Stripes begin to flutter on every porch. The talk is all of patriotism and keeping America
safe for Americans.

“They can wrap themselves in the flag as much as they like,” Aaron says. “It don’t make them more American than us.”

For Tamura, the thought that Aaron might be taken from her fills her with fear. She can’t imagine her life without him. She has forgotten what it is to be herself in the world. So it comes as a
shock when at breakfast one morning he appears in a clean shirt and his kept-for best pants, and, as though it has just occurred to him out of the blue, tells them casually that he is going to volunteer that very day.

“I’m not waiting on some guy I’ve never met to crook his finger and tell me to up sticks.”

“But Aaron, it may never happen. Even if there is a war, they are going to need farmers to keep the land going. Please don’t go, wait a bit. Wait for a couple of months at least.”

“Look, Tamura, it will be best for us all if I’m one of the first to volunteer. They can hardly feel bad about you and Satomi if I’m out there doing my duty, now, can they? Wherever they send me, it will likely only be for a few months.”

It’s the only time that Satomi has heard her parents arguing, although it is more like pleading on Tamura’s part. Aaron, though, is not to be swayed, not even by her mother’s tears. For herself she can’t help feeling a run of excitement at the idea of life without Aaron on her case.

It upsets Aaron seeing Tamura so anxious, but he just can’t bear the idea of being summoned by a higher authority to do their bidding. The way things are moving they are going to get him one way or the other anyway. He might as well make sure that it’s his way.

He volunteers for the Navy, a strange choice, Satomi thinks, for a farmer, but then you can never second-guess Aaron.

Tamura isn’t surprised. “Your father has always loved boats, loved being near the water,” she says. “Hawaii does that to you.”

In the week before he leaves, he stacks the woodshed to the roof with logs, cleans out the well, and adds Tamura’s name to the bank account.

“You two will manage fine,” he says. “The best part of the harvest is in, after all. And Satomi, I expect you to pull your weight, help your mother.”

Tamura watches Aaron walk down the path, not slowing, not looking back, as he swings onto the road. While he’s still in her sights she feels lonely. She stays at the window long after the dust from his heels has settled back to earth, as though he might think better of it and turn for home.

Satomi watches him too, thinking how Aaron being one of the first to volunteer will shut the kids up at school.

“See your father’s still at home,” she will say. “Guess he’s not ready to fight for America, huh?”

“Don’t cry, Mama,” she soothes, putting her arm around Tamura. He’ll be back before you know it. And I’m still here.”

Aaron had talked himself into the idea that he was doing something grand, something that would involve muscle and guns, but before he knows it, he finds himself back in Hawaii as a battleship cook. He can’t work out how that happened. He had written Hawaii as his birthplace on the Navy forms, adding beneath it that for personal reasons it was the only posting he didn’t want.

Tamura laughs through her tears. As far as she is aware, Aaron has never cooked a thing in his life.

“How can he be a cook? Your father has never made himself a meal, never even brewed his own coffee.”

“Guess the crew will find that out soon enough,” Satomi says, doubled up with laughter. The thought of her father peeling vegetables and making omelets is just ridiculous.

In his first letter home, although it wasn’t to be read on the page, both wife and daughter sensed Aaron’s regret at his decision to enlist.

Life in the ship’s galley is a sight easier than that of a farmer. The food’s not bad although the tomatoes that have to be chopped by the sack full aren’t a patch on ours. They have no scent, nothing of the earth about them. The ship has the same problem with rats as we do, only they’re bigger here, less scared of humans. Two days in and we were all taken off board while they fumigated the holds and cabins with poisonous gas. They say two whiffs of the stuff can fell a man, so I’m not breathing deep for a while.

He writes that Hawaii seems different to him, not the least bit like home anymore.

I don’t intend looking up family. No point in dredging up dirt, so you needn’t worry on that score. In any case guys get moved on all the time, I’m hoping not to be stationed here for long.

Tamura had harbored a faint hope that Aaron, back in their old territory, might relent, try to make amends with their families.

“I should have known,” she says to Satomi. “Your father wasn’t built for bending.”

His letters begin to arrive two, sometimes three a week, his big scrawl filling page after page with what seems to them to be ramblings about nothing much, the weather, the ship’s menus, how it’s never quiet on board. Tamura wants to hear that he is missing her, missing home, wants him to tell her that she is doing well keeping things going on the farm. But Aaron’s feelings are nowhere to be read in his letters; something stops him from saying what he feels, from pouring his heart out to her. He can’t admit that he has made a mistake. He feels himself a fool for having volunteered in the first place. Good Lord, what had he been thinking? Life is harder for him in the Navy than he makes out to Tamura. He hates being in such close contact with other men, hearing them snore and sleep-talk at night, smelling the sweaty
animal scent of them. He thinks he sees in them the look of the migrant worker, the look of men who are rootless. But really what he sees, what he can’t make any sense of, are men who haven’t chosen the land, men so unlike himself that he will never feel at ease with them. He mimics their language, laughs at their jokes, attempts to be a regular kind of guy, it’s easier that way.

“Hey, Aaron, you got a pass for tonight? Real pretty girls at the Pearl Bar.”

“Another time, maybe. Things to do.”

He has no use for the white-trash girls with their caked-on makeup and sprayed-stiff hair that you can buy for a buck or two at the Pearl.

“Yeah, we know, another letter to write, eh? You’ll have to show us a photo sometime soon. She must be some looker, to keep you on the hop like that.”

It’s only when the bunks around him lay empty that he can let go. He thinks then of Tamura, of the soft planes of her face, the pools of her eyes, and the feather-weight of her body on his. He takes his small comfort in the privacy of his narrow bunk, a moment’s relief, and only a faint echo of what he so badly craves.