The Buddha in the Attic (5 page)

WE LIKED IT BEST
when they were out having their hair done, or eating lunch at the club, and their husbands were still away at the office, and their children not yet home from school. Nobody was watching us then. Nobody was talking to us. Nobody was sneaking up on us from behind as we were cleaning her fixtures to see if we’d missed any spots. The whole house was empty. Quiet. Ours. We pulled back curtains. Opened windows. Breathed in the fresh air as we moved from one room to the next, dusting and polishing their things.
All they see is the shine
. We felt calmer then. Less afraid. We felt, for once, like ourselves.

A FEW OF US
stole from them. Little things, at first, which we did not think they would miss. A silver fork here. A saltshaker there. The occasional swig of brandy. A beautiful rose-patterned teacup we just had to have. A beautiful rose-patterned saucer. A porcelain vase that was the same shade of green as our mother’s jade Buddha.
I just like pretty things
. A handful of change that had been sitting out on the counter for days. Others of us, though tempted, kept our hands to ourselves, and for our honesty we were well rewarded.
I’m the only servant she’ll let upstairs in her bedroom. All the Negroes have to stay down below in the kitchen
.

SOME OF THEM
dismissed us without any warning and we had no idea what it was we’d done wrong. “You were too pretty,” our husbands would tell us, even though we found it hard to believe this was true. Some of us were so inept we knew we would not last more than one week. We forgot to cook their meat before serving it to them for supper. We burned their oatmeal every time. We dropped their best crystal goblets. We threw out their cheese by mistake. “I thought it was rotten,” we tried to explain. “That’s how it’s
supposed
to smell,” we were told. Some of us had trouble understanding their English, which bore no resemblance to what we had learned in our books. We said “Yes” when they asked us if we would mind folding their laundry and “No” when they asked us to mop, and when they asked us if we’d seen their missing gold earrings we smiled and said, “Oh, is that so?” Others of us just answered “Um-hmm” to whatever they said. Some of us had husbands who had lied to them about our abilities in the kitchen—
My wife’s specialties are chicken Kiev and vichyssoise
—but it soon became apparent that our only specialty was rice. Some of us had grown up on large estates with servants of our own and could not tolerate being told what to do. Some of us did not get along well with their children, whom we found aggressive and loud. Some of us objected to what they said about us to their children when they did not realize we were still in the room.
If you don’t study harder, you’ll end up scrubbing floors just like Lily
.

MOST OF THEM
took little notice of us at all. We were there when they needed us and when they did not, poof, we were gone. We stayed in the background, quietly mopping their floors, waxing their furniture, bathing their children, cleaning the parts of their houses that nobody but us could see. We spoke seldom. We ate little. We were gentle. We were good. We never caused any trouble and allowed them to do with us as they pleased. We let them praise us when they were happy with us. We let them yell at us when they were mad. We let them give us things we did not really want, or need.
If I don’t take that old sweater she’ll accuse me of being too proud
. We did not bother them with questions. We never talked back or complained. We never asked for a raise. For most of us were simple girls from the country who did not speak any English and in America we knew we had no choice but to scrub sinks and wash floors.

WE DID NOT
mention them in our letters to our mothers. We did not mention them in our letters to our sisters or friends. Because in Japan the lowliest job a woman could have was that of a maid.
We have quit the fields and moved into a nice house in town, where my husband has found employment with a family of the first rank. I am putting on weight. I’ve blossomed. I’ve grown half an inch. I wear underwear now. I wear a corset and stockings. I wear a white cotton brassiere. I sleep in until nine every morning and spend my afternoons out of doors with the cat in the garden. My face is fuller. My hips have widened. My stride has lengthened. I am learning how to read
.
I am taking piano lessons. I have mastered the art of American baking and recently won first prize in a contest for my lemon meringue pie. I know you would like it here. The streets are wide and clean and you do not have to take off your shoes when you walk on the grass. I think of you often and will send money home as soon as I can
.

FROM TIME TO TIME
one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping, and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.

SOME OF THEM
asked us to speak a few words in Japanese for them just to hear the sound of our voice.
It doesn’t matter what you say
. Some of them asked us to put on our finest silk kimonos for them and walk slowly up and down their spines. Some of them asked us to tie them up with our flowered silk sashes and call them whatever names came to mind, and we were surprised at what those names were, and how easily they came to us, for we had never before said them out loud. Some of them asked us to tell them our real names, which they then whispered to us again and again until we no longer knew who we were.
Midori. Midori. Midori
. Some of them told us how beautiful we were, even though we knew we were homely and plain.
No man would look at me in Japan
. Some of them asked us how we liked it, or if they were hurting us, and if so were we enjoying the pain, and we said yes, for we were.
At least when I’m with you I know I’m alive
. Some of them lied to us.
I’ve never done this before
. And we, in turn, lied to them.
Neither have I
. Some of them gave us money, which we slipped into our stockings and gave to our husbands that same evening without saying a word. Some of them promised to leave their wives for us, even though we knew they never would. Some of them found out we were pregnant by them—
My husband has not touched me in more than six months
—and then sent us away. “You must get rid of it,” they said to us. They said, “I will pay for everything.” They said, “I will find you employment elsewhere at once.”

ONE OF US
made the mistake of falling in love with him and still thinks of him night and day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who beat her with a broomstick and then lay down and wept. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who divorced her and sent her back to her parents in Japan, where she now works in a silk-reeling mill in Nagano for ten hours a day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who forgave her and then confessed to a few sins of his own.
I have a second family up in Colusa
. One of us said nothing to anyone and slowly lost her mind. One of us wrote home for advice to her mother, who always knew what to do, but never received a reply.
I must cross this bridge by myself
. One of us filled the sleeves of her white silk wedding kimono with stones and wandered out into the sea, and we still say a prayer for her every day.

A FEW OF US
ended up servicing them exclusively in pink hotels above pool halls and liquor stores in the seedier parts of their towns. We shouted out to them from the second-story windows of the Tokyo House, where the youngest of us was barely ten years old. We gazed at them over the tops of our painted paper fans at the Yokohama House, and for the right price we did for them whatever their wives would not do for them at home. We introduced ourselves to them as Mistress Saki and Honorable Miss Cherry Blossom in high, girlish voices at the Aloha House, and when they asked us where we were from we smiled and said, “Oh, somewhere in Kyoto.” We danced with them at the New Eden Night Club and charged them fifty cents for every fifteen minutes of our time. And if they wanted to come upstairs with us we told them it was five dollars a go, or twenty dollars to keep the room until morning. And when they were finished with us we handed their money over to our bosses, who gambled nightly, and paid regular bribes to the police, and would not let us sleep with anyone of our own race.
A pretty girl like you is worth a thousand pieces of gold
.

SOMETIMES
, while we were lying with them, we found ourselves longing for our husbands, from whom we had run away.
Was he really so bad? So brutal? So dull?
Sometimes we found ourselves falling in love with our bosses, who had kidnapped us at knifepoint as we were coming in from the fields.
He brings me things. He talks to me. He lets me go for walks
. Sometimes we convinced ourselves that after one year at the Eureka House we would have enough money to pay for our passage back home, but at the end of that year all we had was fifty cents and a bad dose of the clap.
Next year
, we told ourselves.
Or maybe the year after that
. But even the prettiest of us knew that our days were numbered, for in our line of work you were either finished or dead by the time you were twenty.

ONE OF THEM
bought us out of the brothel where we worked and brought us home to a big house on a tree-lined street in Montecito, whose name we shall not reveal. There were hibiscus in the windows, marble tabletops, leather sofas, glass dishes filled with nuts for whenever the guests stopped by. There was a beloved white dog we named Shiro, after the dog we had left behind in Japan, and we walked her with pleasure three times a day. There was an electric icebox. A Gramophone. A Majestic radio. A Model T Ford in the driveway that we cranked up every Sunday and took out for a drive. There was a tiny maid named Consuelo, who came from the Philippines, and baked wonderful custards, and pies, and anticipated our every need. She knew when we were happy. She knew when we were sad. She knew when we’d fought the night before and when we’d had a good time. And for all of this we were forever grateful to our new husband, without whom we would still be working the streets.
The moment I saw him I knew I’d been saved
. But every now and then we’d find ourselves wondering about the man we had left behind. Did he burn all our things the day after we left him? Did he tear up our letters? Did he hate us? Did he miss us? Did he care whether we were dead or alive? Was he still working as a yardman for the Burnhams on Sutter Street? Had he put in their daffodils yet? Had he finished reseeding their lawn? Did he still eat his supper alone, every evening, in Mrs. Burnham’s great big kitchen, or had he finally made friends with Mrs. Burnham’s favorite Negro maid? Did he still read three pages from the
Manual of Gardening
every night before going to bed? Did he still dream of one day becoming majordomo? Sometimes, in the late afternoon, just as the light was beginning to fade, we took out his yellowing photograph from our trunk and looked at it one last time. But no matter how hard we tried we could not make ourselves throw it away.

A NUMBER OF US
found ourselves hunched over their galvanized tin washtubs on our third day in America, quietly scrubbing their things: stained pillowcases and bed-sheets, soiled handkerchiefs, dirty collars, white lace slips so lovely we thought they should be worn over, and not under. We worked in basement laundries in Japantowns in the most run-down sections of their cities—San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, L.A.—and every morning we rose before dawn with our husbands and we washed and we boiled and we scrubbed. And at night when we put down our brushes and climbed into bed we dreamed we were still washing, as we would every night for years. And even though we had not come all the way to America to live in a tiny, curtained-off room at the back of the Royal Hand Laundry, we knew we could not go home.
If you come home
, our fathers had written to us,
you will disgrace the entire family. If you come home your younger sisters will never marry. If you come home no man will ever have you again
. And so we stayed in J-town with our new husbands, and grew old before our time.

IN J-TOWN
we rarely saw them at all. We waited tables seven days a week at our husbands’ lunch counters and noodle shops, where we knew all the regulars by heart. Yamamoto-san. Natsuhara-san. Eto-san, Kodami-san. We cleaned the rooms of our husbands’ cheap boardinghouses, and twice a day we cooked meals for their guests, who looked just like ourselves. We bought our groceries at Fujioka Grocery, where they sold all the things we remembered from home: green leaf tea, Mitsuwa soap, incense, pickled plums, fresh tofu, dried seaweed to help fend off goiters and cold. We bought bootleg sake for our husbands at the pool hall beneath the brothel on the corner of Third and Main, but made sure to put on our white aprons first so we would not be mistaken for whores in the alley. We bought our dresses at Yada Ladies’ Shop and our shoes at Asahi Shoe, where the shoes actually came in our size. We bought our face cream at Tenshodo Drug. We went to the public bathhouse every Saturday and gossiped with our neighbors and friends. Was it true that Kisayo refused to let her husband enter the house through the front door? Had Mikiko really run away with a card dealer from the Toyo Club? And what had Hagino done to her hair?
It looks like a rat’s nest
. We went to Yoshinaga’s Dental Clinic for our toothaches, and for our back and knee pains we went to Dr. Hayano, the acupuncturist, who also knew the art of shiatsu massage. And whenever we needed advice in matters of the heart—
Should I leave him or should I stay?—
we went to Mrs. Murata, the fortune-teller, who lived in the blue house on Second Street above Asakawa Pawn, and we sat with her in her kitchen with our heads bowed and our hands on our knees while we waited for her to receive a message from the gods.
If you leave him now there will be no other
. And all of this took place on a four-block-long stretch of town that was more Japanese than the village we’d left behind in Japan.
If I close my eyes I don’t even know I’m living in a foreign land
.