A Girl Like You (8 page)
Satomi catches Lily’s eye and smiles. Lily shrugs her shoulders, looks hostile.
“Time to go home now, girls,” Miss Ray says in a high shaky voice, raising her arms in the air as though she is about to conduct an orchestra. “Be quick, now, your parents will be expecting you.”
Outside the church hall Satomi catches up with Lily.
“What do you think it’s all about, Lily?” she asks. “Mr. Beck and Miss Ray all fired up like that.”
“Well, they ain’t getting married, so I reckon we must be at war with the Japs.”
Forgetting for once that “ain’t” is common, Lily turns from her, her voice hard, dismissive.
Of course Lily is right. It can’t be anything else. Satomi swallows hard, her mouth dry, she doesn’t have enough spit and it hurts a bit. She looks down the street as though hoards of the enemy might already be on the march there.
A bunch of girls pass her, silent in their wondering, staring at her with narrowing eyes. They purse their lips, stiffen their shoulders, and start for home in huddled clusters keeping close for comfort. Mr. Beck has unnerved them. The Japs could already be nearby, in the bushes, perhaps, waiting for them on the road home.
“No need to make it a war between us,” Satomi calls to Lily’s retreating back. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She starts for home. Perhaps her mother would know what it is all about.
Lily, running to catch up with the girls who are walking her way, links arms with one of them, keeping her back straight, her head tilted as though she is sniffing the air. If the news turns out to be war, then she has the best excuse ever to dump Satomi. Artie would have to do the same.
From the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she never spoke to Satomi again.
They hear the president’s speech on the radio, his voice steady above the background sounds of flashbulbs flaring:
Yesterday, December the seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of Japan.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that many American lives have been lost.
As though standing at attention, Satomi and Tamura have positioned themselves a little apart from each other. Tamura is trembling, sheet-white, her head bowed. Satomi, returned to the childhood habit she had when trying to figure things out, chews at her lower lip. She’s attempting to understand the president, to make sense of his words, but her thoughts keep returning to Aaron. She can’t stop picturing him all burned up, hurting.
Reaching out, she takes Tamura’s hand and squeezes it. Tamura dares not look at her, dares not have her own fears mirrored in her daughter’s eyes. She has stopped listening to the radio and is forming her own story in her mind. Of course Aaron is alive, wounded
maybe, in a hospital perhaps, but alive. They will hear from him soon, be able to count themselves among the lucky.
The day is tepid, warm enough for the time of year, but a chill has seeped through Satomi so that she has hunched her shoulders, as though bracing herself against a bitter wind. She lets go Tamura’s hand and turns the volume up to full.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Midway Islands.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
In the moment that Aaron catches fire, Tamura is hauling bags of fertilizer onto the trailer, priding herself on how neatly she is stacking them. She has been working the fields for a couple of hours already, thinking that Aaron on Hawaiian time will still be sleeping. With luck he will be home for Christmas. He has written saying as much, although he advises against counting on it.
Once the government’s got you, you can’t count on anything. I guess even if I make it home it won’t be much of a break. I”ll need to catch up on things. Guess there’s plenty that needs catching up on. You can’t neglect the land for long before it starts paying you back.
She allows herself a moment of satisfaction. He is going to be surprised for sure when he sees how good the land is looking, despite the fact that she hasn’t gotten around to the weeds that margin the fields, some of them so pretty in their flower that she
hardly thinks of them as weeds at all. He should have more faith in her.
She pictures him walking up the road to their farm, smart now in his uniform, a rare smile on his face. The image sets an alarm off in her, so that she loses the rhythm of her task for a bit. In working the land she has neglected the house. Things are not as Aaron likes them, as he will expect them to be. She determines that she will clear her head and get on with the chores she has let go.
She will wash the floors, clear the bindweed from around the kitchen door, make jams and jellies, and pickles from the bruised cucumbers. She will pound the rice for Aaron’s favorite soup. She will make sure that everything is just as he likes it. With Aaron home, life will return to normal, the awful uncertainty in her will lift. She will be her old self again.
An hour or so later, standing to stretch her back, she sees Elena Kaplan running down the field toward her as though her life depends on it.
Tamura’s spectacles aren’t so great with distances, things tend to blur, but who else can it be but Elena. Something is wrong, though, that’s for sure. Only a child hurtles at that speed for the fun of it. It’s a while before her friend’s red hair, her wide shoulders, come into focus.
“Oh, Tamura!” Elena exclaims. “It’s just so awful.”
“Awful?” Tamura scans Elena’s face, looking for the familiar signs of Hal’s brutality, but can see only fading bruises from his last beating. One must be due, she guesses, he likes to keep them regular just so she knows she can rely on them.
You don’t know, do you?” Elena says, pained at the sight of Tamura’s innocent smile. “Oh, God, you don’t know,” she moves to Tamura’s side and puts an arm around her shoulders.
Hal had relayed the news of the bombing to her, shouting it
through the window as she was hoeing the soil in her vegetable plot.
“Bad news, and worse to come,” he called, beckoning her into the house. “If it wasn’t for this damn leg of mine, I’d make those sorry bastards pay.”
Elena is sick of hearing Hal go on about his polio-damaged leg. He blames his slight limp for everything that goes wrong in his life, for the bad luck that follows him, even as some sort of sick excuse for knocking the stuffing out of her whenever he feels like it.
“This is just about the last straw,” he raged. “Don’t let me catch you mixing with them down the hill anymore, you hear? From now on, you remember where your loyalties lie.”
She was scared witless of him but already planning to disobey. Disobeying him is the only thing that keeps her sane. Just the thought of the meanness in him, his big ham hands itching to lash out, makes her stomach sink, but no way is Hal Kaplan going to choose her friends for her.
Hal’s first beating had been on their wedding night, when, stinking of beer and rough with drink, he had shoved her face-down on the bed and attempted to mount her. She had pushed him away, desiring something more romantic, something more loving. She had learned her lesson that night. In Hal Kaplan’s bed he called the shots.
“I’m going to town,” he said. “Need to talk it over with the men. Don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Before the growl of his pickup had faded she was running down the field to Tamura. How could she not go to her sweet neighbor at such a time? Over the years, Tamura had shown herself to be a true friend. She remembered the comfort Tamura had given when Hal, third day into a drinking binge, had blamed her for their not conceiving a child and beaten her until her face had swollen to the size of a pumpkin. Tamura had bathed her wounds,
stitching with cotton and a small-eyed needle the deep split that had exposed her jawbone. The scar is still there, neat as anything, Tamura’s tiny stitches a thin white tattoo on Elena’s brown face. Tamura Baker doesn’t judge, she just sets about making things better.
“It’s a terrible shock, Tamura. You had better sit down. Let’s go in, I will make you some tea.”
There’s a ringing in Tamura’s head as she tries to make sense of Elena’s news, a heaviness working its way from her feet, which seem too leaden to move, up to her stomach. Something painfully hot is tiding around her heart, churning things up.
“That Japan should do such a thing,” she muses, feeling oddly betrayed. “It can’t be true.”
“I’ll wait with you until Satomi comes home. She will look after you. The news has been too much for you. You need your girl.”
“There’s no need, Elena. It’s terrible news, the worst I’ve ever heard, but Aaron can’t be dead. I would know if he was. I promise you, I would know if he was.”
“Your father is not dead,” she repeats often and too brightly in the hours after the president’s broadcast. “It’s a good sign that we have heard nothing, bad news never keeps you waiting.”
Satomi thinks of Mr. Beck arriving at Miss Ray’s class with the bad news. It had certainly reached Angelina without much of a pause. And here only a day later they are at war. Perhaps her mother is right. Perhaps good news is a sluggish traveler.
She stays close to Tamura, brewing endless cups of tea, wandering aimlessly around the land with her, shaken at her mother’s seeming lack of emotion. Her own emotions run the gambit through fear for her father’s life to the sickening hurt at Lily’s betrayal. They don’t compare, she knows—the loss of a friend, after all, being nothing to the loss of a father—but still it eats away at
her. The sight of Lily’s retreating back yesterday had something of triumph in it, some pleasure in her cruelty. How could she ever have thought Lily Morton a true friend?
She tries to fight off the hurt, but no matter how she attempts to dismiss it, the nasty feel of it won’t budge. She holds herself together, not crying, keeping her tears stored for Aaron in case it should come to that.
“She is a foolish girl,” Tamura says. “Not made for true friendship.”
As always, Satomi takes the initiative with Artie. She waits for him at the school gate, ignoring the catcalls of her fellow pupils, and gives him back his class ring before he can summon the courage to ask for it.
“You might as well have this, Artie. I’m never coming back to school, that’s for sure. And we were never going to make it anyway. Chalk and cheese.”
Artie makes a pretense of not wanting to take the ring. Not much of one, but a try, at least.
“It’s just for now,” he says sheepishly, dropping it into his shirt pocket. “You can have it back when things die down a bit.” He pats the pocket to let her know he is keeping it safe for her.
“Don’t sweat it, Artie. You and me, it was just a kid’s thing. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Maybe.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
She can tell that he is relieved that she has made it easy for him. Well, she had known all along that he didn’t have what it takes. Still, his obvious relief hurts, sets up something steely in her.
“See you around, then,” he says, turning from her. His brother has been called to the Army, and he wants to get on with the business of hating the Japs without having to pussyfoot around her. She was never going to put out anyway.
With an odd mixture of dread and relief Satomi sees the telegraph boy—not a boy at all, but Mr. Stedall, who is forty if he is a day—appear in the small plot of garden at the back of the house.
She taps Tamura lightly on the shoulder to draw her attention to his arrival. Tamura stands to face him, leaving the weeding they have been doing to keep busy, to keep the waiting at bay. Since Tamura won’t allow the possibility of Aaron’s death to be spoken of, despite that it is the text of their nightmares, the constant thought in their minds, they have run out of things to say to each other.
“Sorry to give you this, Mrs. Baker,” Mr. Stedall says, offering the telegram. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Guess you know what it is.”
Tamura looks toward the horizon as though something there, something far, far away, has caught her attention. She keeps her hands at her side, her body still. She has always liked Mr. Stedall, but the desire to please has left her, she can’t bring herself to smile.
“Mrs. Baker …”
She shakes her head, as though saying no, as though she can dismiss Mr. Stedall, he is an illusion, he isn’t really there, standing in her garden waving the telegram at her. She doesn’t want to touch the ugly thing, see the stupid words written, so that she has to believe them. She isn’t ready to give up on hope.
Satomi, feeling a run of shame and pity at Tamura’s cowardice, takes the telegram from Mr. Stedall’s trembling hand. He moves away from her, looking at her inquisitively, as though she might be about to faint away, fall perhaps into his arms.
“You can go now, Mr. Stedall,” she says quietly. “I’m guessing that you don’t need an answer.”
A week or so after the telegram a letter from the Navy arrives. Satomi opens it, begins to read it out loud, but Tamura will have none of it.
“Stop, I don’t want to hear it. Throw it away, Satomi. I know what I know.”
“It’s the truth, Mama. You know it is.”
But Tamura doesn’t want the truth. She wants sweet lies, the comfort of fantasy. The sight of the telegram had been bad enough, but somehow the letter, the leaf-thinness of it, the official Navy stamp, is worse. Taking to her bed, she buries herself under the sweaty shade of her sheets and attempts to fool herself into believing that Aaron is alive, that the
knowing
she talks about is real.