The Buddha in the Attic (7 page)

A FEW OF US
were unable to have them, and this was the worst fate of all. For without an heir to carry on the family name the spirits of our ancestors would cease to exist.
I feel like I came all the way to America for nothing
. Sometimes we tried going to the faith healer, who told us that our uterus was the wrong shape and there was nothing that could be done. “Your destiny has been settled by the gods,” she said to us, and then she showed us to the door. Or we consulted the acupuncturist, Dr. Ishida, who took one look at us and said, “Too much yang,” and gave us herbs to nourish our yin and blood. And three months later we found ourselves miscarrying yet again. Sometimes we were sent by our husband back home to Japan, where the rumors would follow us for the rest of our lives. “Divorced,” the neighbors would whisper. And, “I hear she’s dry as a gourd.” Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she would make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not—the only thing he wanted, he had said to us, was to grow old by our side—we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had.
Every night I can hear them playing outside my window in the trees
.

IN J-TOWN
they lived with us eight and nine to a room behind our barbershops and bathhouses and in tiny unpainted apartments that were so dark we had to leave the lights on all day long. They chopped carrots for us in our restaurants. They stacked apples for us at our fruit stands. They climbed up onto their bicycles and delivered bags of groceries to our customers’ back doors. They separated the colors from the whites in our basement laundries and quickly learned to tell the difference between a red wine stain and blood. They swept the floors of our boardinghouses. They changed towels. They stripped sheets. They made up the beds. They opened doors on things that should never be seen.
I thought he was praying but he was dead
. They brought supper every evening to the elderly widow in 4A from Nagasaki, Mrs. Kawamura, who worked as a chambermaid at the Hotel Drexel and had no children of her own.
My husband was a gambler who left me with only forty-five cents
. They played go in the lobby with the bachelor, Mr. Morita, who started out as a presser at the Empress Hand Laundry thirty years ago and still worked there as a presser to this day.
It all went by so fast
. They trailed their fathers from one yard to the next as they made their gardening rounds and learned how to trim the hedges and mow the grass. They waited for us on wooden slatted benches in the park while we finished cleaning the houses across the street.
Don’t talk to strangers
, we told them.
Study hard. Be patient. Whatever you do, don’t end up like me
.

AT SCHOOL
they sat in the back of the classroom in their homemade clothes with the Mexicans and spoke in timid, faltering voices. They never raised their hands. They never smiled. At recess they huddled together in a corner of the school yard and whispered among themselves in their secret, shameful language. In the cafeteria they were always last in line for lunch. Some of them—our firstborns—hardly knew any English and whenever they were called upon to speak their knees began to shake. One of them, when asked her name by the teacher, replied, “Six,” and the laughter rang in her ears for days. Another said his name was Table, and for the rest of his life that was what he was called. Many of them begged us not to be sent back, but within weeks, it seemed, they could name all the animals in English and read aloud every sign that they saw whenever we went shopping downtown—the street of the tall timber poles, they told us, was called State Street, and the street of the unfriendly barbers was Grove, and the bridge from which Mr. Itami had jumped after the stock market collapsed was the Last Chance Bridge—and wherever they went they were able to make their desires known.
One chocolate malt, please
.

ONE BY ONE
all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors. They forgot the names of the fox god and the thunder god and the god of poverty, whom we could never escape.
No matter how long we live in this country they’ll never let us buy land
. They forgot the name of the water goddess, Mizu Gami, who protected our rivers and streams and insisted that we keep our wells clean. They forgot the words for snow-light and bell cricket and fleeing in the night. They forgot what to say at the altar to our dead ancestors, who watched over us night and day. They forgot how to count. They forgot how to pray. They spent their days now living in the new language, whose twenty-six letters still eluded us even though we had been in America for years.
All I learned was the letter
x
so I could sign my name at the bank
. They pronounced their
l
’s and
r
’s with ease. And even when we sent them to the Buddhist church on Saturdays to study Japanese they did not learn a thing.
The only reason my children go is to get out of working in the store
. But whenever we heard them talking out loud in their sleep the words that came out of their mouths came out—we were sure of it—in Japanese.

THEY GAVE THEMSELVES
new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce. One called herself Doris. One called herself Peggy. Many called themselves George. Saburo was called Chinky by all the others because he looked just like a Chinaman. Toshitachi was called Harlem because his skin was so dark. Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. “It’s his mother’s name,” she explained. To which we replied, “So is yours.” Sumire called herself Violet. Shizuko was Sugar. Makoto was just Mac. Shigeharu Takagi joined the Baptist church at the age of nine and changed his name to Paul. Edison Kobayashi was born lazy but had a photographic memory and could tell you the name of every person he’d ever met. Grace Sugita didn’t like ice cream.
Too cold
. Kitty Matsutaro expected nothing and got nothing in return. Six-foot-four Tiny Honda was the biggest Japanese we’d ever seen. Mop Yamasaki had long hair and liked to dress like a girl. Lefty Hayashi was the star pitcher at Emerson Junior High. Sam Nishimura had been sent to Tokyo to receive a proper Japanese education and had just returned to America after six and a half years.
They made him start all over again in the first grade
. Daisy Takada had perfect posture and liked to do things in sets of four. Mabel Ota’s father had gone bankrupt three times. Lester Nakano’s family bought all their clothes at the Goodwill. Tommy Takayama’s mother was—everyone knew it—a whore.
She has six different children by five different men. And two of them are twins
.

SOON
we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief.
I feel like a duck that’s hatched goose’s eggs
. They preferred their own company to ours and pretended not to understand a word that we said. Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner, and moved with undignified haste. They wore their garments too loose. They swayed their hips like mares. They chattered away like coolies the moment they came home from school and said whatever popped into their minds.
Mr. Dempsey has a folded ear
. Our sons grew enormous. They insisted on eating bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast instead of bean-paste soup. They refused to use chopsticks. They drank gallons of milk. They poured ketchup all over their rice. They spoke perfect English just like on the radio and whenever they caught us bowing before the kitchen god in the kitchen and clapping our hands they rolled their eyes and said, “Mama,
please.
”

MOSTLY
, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents.
Every sing oh righ?
Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out.
Can’t you put on a little lipstick?
They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town.
We live like beggars
. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor’s birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

SOME OF THEM
developed unusually good vocabularies and became the best students in their class. They won prizes for best essay on California wildflowers. They received highest honors in science. They had more gold stars than anyone else on the teacher’s chart. Others fell behind every year during harvest season and had to repeat the same grade twice. One got pregnant at fourteen and was sent away to live with her grandparents on a silkworm farm in remote western Japan.
Every week she writes to me asking when she can come home
. One took his own life. Several quit school. A few ran wild. They formed their own gangs. They made up their own rules.
No knives. No girls. No Chinese allowed
. They went around late at night looking for other people to fight.
Let’s go beat up some Filipinos
. And when they were too lazy to leave the neighborhood they stayed at home and fought among themselves.
You goddamn Jap!
Others kept their heads down and tried not to be seen. They went to no parties (they were invited to no parties). They played no instruments (they had no instruments to play). They never got Valentines (they never sent Valentines). They didn’t like to dance (they didn’t have the right shoes). They floated ghostlike, through the halls, with their eyes turned away and their books clutched to their chests, as though lost in a dream. If someone called them a name behind their back they did not hear it. If someone called them a name to their face they just nodded and walked on. If they were given the oldest textbooks to use in math class they shrugged and took it in stride.
I never really liked algebra anyway
. If their pictures appeared at the end of the yearbook they pretended not to mind. “That’s just the way it is,” they said to themselves. And, “So what?” And, “Who cares?” Because they knew that no matter what they did they would never really fit in.
We’re just a bunch of Buddhaheads
.

THEY LEARNED
which mothers would let them come over (Mrs. Henke, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Alfred Chandler III) and which would not (all the other mothers). They learned which barbers would cut their hair (the Negro barbers) and which barbers to avoid (the grumpy barbers on the south side of Grove). They learned that there were certain things that would never be theirs: higher noses, fairer complexions, longer legs that might be noticed from afar.
Every morning I do my stretching exercises but it doesn’t seem to help
. They learned when they could go swimming at the YMCA—
Colored days are on Mondays
—and when they could go to the picture show at the Pantages Theater downtown (never). They learned that they should always call the restaurant first.
Do you serve Japanese?
They learned not to go out alone during the daytime and what to do if they found themselves cornered in an alley after dark.
Just tell them you know judo
. And if that didn’t work, they learned to fight back with their fists.
They respect you when you’re strong
. They learned to find protectors. They learned to hide their anger.
No, of course. I don’t mind. That’s fine. Go ahead
. They learned never to show their fear. They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.

STILL
, they dreamed. One swore she would one day marry a preacher so she wouldn’t have to pick berries on Sundays. One wanted to save up enough money to buy his own farm. One wanted to become a tomato grower like his father. One wanted to become anything but. One wanted to plant a vineyard. One wanted to start his own label.
I’d call it Fukuda Orchards
. One could not wait until the day she got off the ranch. One wanted to go to college even though no one she knew had ever left the town.
I know it’s crazy, but …
One loved living out in the country and never wanted to leave.
It’s better here. Nobody knows who we are
. One wanted something more but could not say exactly what it was.
This just isn’t enough
. One wanted a Swing King drum set with hi-hat cymbals. One wanted a spotted pony. One wanted his own paper route. One wanted her own room, with a lock on the door.
Anyone who came in would have to knock first
. One wanted to become an artist and live in a garret in Paris. One wanted to go to refrigeration school.
You can do it through the mail
. One wanted to build bridges. One wanted to play the piano. One wanted to operate his own fruit stand alongside the highway instead of working for somebody else. One wanted to learn shorthand at the Merritt Secretarial Academy and get an inside job in an office.
Then I’d have it made
. One wanted to become the next Great Togo on the professional wrestling circuit. One wanted to become a state senator. One wanted to cut hair and open her own salon. One had polio and just wanted to breathe without her iron lung. One wanted to become a master seamstress. One wanted to become a teacher. One wanted to become a doctor. One wanted to become his sister. One wanted to become a gangster. One wanted to become a star. And even though we saw the darkness coming we said nothing and let them dream on.