A Girl Like You

  “The baby came quickly,” she says, looking to the corner of the room, where a bloody towel-wrapped bundle lays lifeless. “I thought the bleeding would stop, but it just keeps coming.”

  “Water, please, Satomi. Lots of it, if you can manage, and the cloths from my bag.” His movements are sure, his voice calm, his heart sinking.

  Outside at the spigot, Satomi fills a thin tin bucket up to the worn part where holes pepper the sides, and gulps down the fresh air as if it were a long cool drink. She hesitates, not wanting to go back in, only moving when Dr. Harper calls her name urgently as though it is a question.

  Inside, as the doctor is examining the dead baby, Satomi takes Mrs. Takei’s hand. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Takei,” she says. “About the baby, I mean.” She meant to sound sympathetic, warm, but her voice comes out small, useless.

  Mrs. Takei takes two days to die. The blood transfusions Dr. Harper administers seem to pump in and flow out in equal measure. Mrs. Takei can’t hold on, either to the blood or to life.

  She’s buried with her baby in her arms, leaving her husband and her seven boys to fend for themselves.

  Satomi carries the vision of that desperate day, the blood and the brutal sight of the parceled infant, around with her for weeks. Forever after, the smell of blood makes her queasy, sets her heart racing.

  On her rounds with Dr. Harper, one crisis runs into another so that faces blur, names are forgotten. There are cases of adult measles, strange fevers, and plenty of the geriatric pneumonia that Dr. Harper calls “the old man’s friend.”

  “Speeds them along the path to meet their maker,” he says.

  Mrs. Takei, though, stays in her mind with frightening clarity, as does the man with septicemia, who left untreated the cut he received from a broken pan in the latrines. By the time Dr. Harper got to him, you could feel the heat coming off his leg from a foot away. Thick pus oozed from the wound, and a long red line snaked up his skin from thigh to waist. In his spiking fever there was no sense to be had from him. He was hallucinating, thrashing about, shouting warnings to the wall.

  Dr. Harper got him into the camp hospital and set up twenty-four-hour nursing, but he couldn’t save him. The man’s blood was poisoned, his organs failed, and he died in agony.

  “Just from a cut,” Satomi said to Dr. Harper in amazement.

  “An easy route into the body for bacteria, Satomi.”

  “Yes, but just from a cut.”

  She wondered if the camp was the cause of the disasters, or whether such things happened in the world outside too. Perhaps she had just been unaware of them.

  “It’s the same the world over,” Dr. Harper says. “It’s just that here the lack of facilities, the poor hygiene, turns sickness to tragedy more often.”

  One case she knew that she could blame on the camp for sure was that of a boy a year or so younger than Haru. He had fallen into a depression and in his lowest moment had drunk industrial-strength chlorine, stolen from the mess hall while his mother was at work.

  She had found him in agony, blisters the size of cookies around his mouth, his throat scorched from first swallowing the chlorine and then vomiting it up, so that he could hardly speak.

  “He was always a happy boy before we came to this place,” his mother said bitterly. “He wanted to be a doctor like you, Dr. Harper. He likes helping people.”

  “He still can be,” Dr. Harper assured her. “You must help him to look on the world as promising. Keep him from attempting anything like this again.”

  “But he has spoiled his beautiful face. He will be scarred forever.”

  Dr. Harper, usually good with words, could find none. It would be more than a bit of scarring the boy would suffer. What was inside, what his mother couldn’t see, would be more of a problem.

  “It’s this place,” Satomi hissed to Dr. Harper on their way out of the barrack. “This disgusting, filthy place.”

  There have been days since that time when she can’t bring herself to accompany Dr. Harper on his rounds. Days when she just wants to forget other people’s troubles. Sometimes it’s more than she can manage to stay mad. She waits for Haru to return from work, losing herself in stories until he does. Books take her away from Manzanar, allow her to live other lives in her head for a while. And books are available to her now since the library has finally opened.

  “We have a lot to thank the Quakers for,” she tells Dr. Harper in a rare moment of gratitude. “That people who have never met us care for us, well, it’s …”

  He has never heard her so pleased, so fulsome about anything before. It’s a good sign, he thinks, there must be balance in life after all.

  Tamura, though, is not of the same mind.

  “You need more than books, more than the company of an old man to fill your days,” she says. She has never met Dr. Harper, and, like Haru but for a mother’s reasons, she disapproves of the friendship. It’s odd, for a start, and she worries that Dr. Harper is exposing Satomi to things best left to her elders. And there’s the nuisance of Satomi pleading with her to let Dr. Harper examine her.

  “Please, Mother. Just let him give you something for your cough, examine your chest.”

  “Soon, maybe,” she says reluctantly.

  “Keep out of the medics’ hands for as long as you can,” Aaron used to say. “Once they get their hands on you, it’s all downhill.” Satomi loves the way Haru flirts with her now, even though he keeps up the pretense that she is still a kid. He plays at being irked that he has to put up with her, the annoying girl from next door, shaking his head when she teases him, letting the smile slip from him, frowning a little. He is on the point of kissing her, she knows, and just the anticipation of it warms her up.

  Sometimes in the afternoons, to stop herself thinking of him, to keep her heart from flipping at the thought of them touching, she helps Mrs. Hamada out with her brood, washing the little ones’ shining faces, taking their pudgy little hands in her own as she makes up games and tells them stories. She enjoys being with the children and it gives Mrs. Hamada an hour or two of peace, time to take a shower, to catch up with the washing.

  “You had better be careful,” Eriko says, smothering a smile. “Before you know it you’ll be popular.”

  “Oh, it’s just something to do,” Satomi says.

  “You don’t have to apologize for it, Satomi,” Naomi says, woken from her afternoon sleep by their chatter. “It’s good to fill your days, to help others.”

  Unlike Naomi, Satomi is filled with restless energy and can’t sleep in the day. At night her dreams are of a different sort than the old woman’s.

  “Mine are always about home, and food,” Naomi says. “Sweet fried fish, red beans, rice soup.”

  In Satomi’s, memories work themselves through her mind so that the past becomes whole again. She sees the fox, haughty by the porcelainberry bush, hears Mr. Beck’s voice, “Know what ‘exotic’ means, Satomi?”

  Sometimes she dreams of Tamura disappearing from her view like smoke dissolving as she reaches out for her. She wakes from those dreams to the form of the robe hovering over her like some Oriental specter.

  “It’s the same for me,” Haru says. “I dream of losing my family. This place does that to you. It changes everything. Yumi no longer eats with us. She goes to a different mess hall with her friends, as though she is ashamed to be one of us. My grandmother’s bones ache and her memory is going, she is losing the present, living more and more in the past. It makes me wonder how I am to take care of them here.

  Confessing their fears, they find themselves one evening under a waxing moon, kissing for the first time. She has longed for it, imagined how it would be, but when it comes, when Haru leans in to her, she feels like running. Should she open her mouth and taste him, let him taste her, as she had with Artie? She wants to reach up and put her arms around him, pull him to her, but something stops her, some reserve in him, the uncomfortable idea that she wants it more than he does.

  He is unflatteri
ngly measured in his approach, in the small pause he takes as though he is debating it, fighting it.

  When he does kiss her, there is nothing of the fumbling boy in him, he isn’t carried away as she is. His kiss is an accomplished kiss, not hungry as Artie’s had been. Not as wholehearted either, she thinks.

  It would have hurt her to know that after, when they had walked in silence back to Sewer Alley, he was already regretting it, wishing that they had never gotten started. She is just a kid, after all, not that much older than Yumi. He doesn’t want things to get complicated, messed up, doesn’t want his mother and Tamura on his case, having expectations.

  As the days pass, though, he can’t deny that the scent of her, clean as a bolt of new cotton, the warm spread of her breasts pushed up against his chest, have stirred him up so that he can hardly think of anything else. A girl like her, offering herself, seems at once both shameful and irresistible.

  “What’s the matter with you these days, Haru?” Eriko asks. “You are off somewhere in your head all the time. Tamura is still waiting for you to fix the split in her floor.”

  “I’ll get to it, Mother, just as soon as …”

  And he will. He will stop wasting time thinking of Satomi, keep it light with her. He has his plans, has held them too long to let a pretty face hold him back. It makes him uncomfortable that he thinks of her a hundred times a day, that she takes his mind off more important things.

  “I know that you like Satomi,” Eriko says. “I have seen you looking at her, but I don’t think that she is for you. And even if she is, that is more reason for you to treat her with respect.”

  “I’m not interested,” he insists. “We’re friends, that’s all. We have things in common.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, this place, for a start, and she’s intelligent, you know, interested in books and ideas. I can talk to her.”

  The world as Haru had known it has slipped from his grasp, but he is determined to get it back. If he has to fight to be an American, then so be it. His family has worked hard to build the American dream. He believes in it still. Despite Manzanar, the stupid awful things that go on in the camp, he can’t let the beautiful idea of the American dream go.

  “I’m going to sign up just as soon as they’ll let me. I’m going to sign up and fight for my country,” he warns Satomi.

  “Some country,” she scoffs. “It isn’t our country anymore. We’re the enemy”

  “No, we’re not, and that’s the point. Why can’t you see that?”

  “It’s not me that’s blind, Haru.”

  “Look, Sati, sometimes the things you love don’t live up to your expectations. But you can’t just give up on them, can you? Whatever you feel now, this is your country as much as anyone’s.”

  “I don’t see how you can think that in this place. You’d have to be mad to think that.”

  “I think it because all Americans are immigrants of one sort or another. Being white doesn’t make you more American than if you’re black or any color in between.”

  “Hard to believe that when you’re locked up for it, though.”

  “No country in the world beats America, Sati. It’s our home. We’ll get over this.”

  “Well, I’m going to get out of it just as soon as I can. I’m going to travel the world and never come back here.”

  “What nationality will you put on your passport?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have a choice, do I? It would have to be American, I guess.”

  “Exactly, you don’t have a choice. You are as American as the rest of us.”

  Pioneers

  Haru says that they are pioneers at Manzanar, frontiers-people who must invent ways of coping with the little at hand they have to see them through.

  “The Japanese are an ingenious people,” he says. “We find answers to problems.”

  But even he runs for cover when the dust storms come. Everyone does. Ingenious or not, no one has found an answer to them. Sucking up dirt on their way into camp, they rain it back down on Manzanar’s inmates on their stampede out. The gales are impervious to whatever Manzanar puts up against them. When they blow, there is nothing to be done but to huddle inside and wait them out, to bear the gritty winds that banshee-howl through the cracks in their walls.

  Satomi and Tamura, with their knees up to their chins and their heads down, squat together beside their stove under the cover of a blanket.

  “We are so often buried alive in the dirt,” Eriko says, “that death, when it comes, won’t seem much different.”

  “It’s hell’s mouth opening,” Tamura says. “Spewing out its rage.”

  She has learned how to spot when the storms are on the horizon long before the distant moan of them can be heard.

  “It’s on its way,” she warns with resignation. “The clouds are sitting right on top of the mountain, all bunched up and ready to pounce.”

  “Have you got your cotton strips ready, Mama?”

  Tamura saves the camouflage off-cuts from the factory floor to cover her mouth with on her way to and from work.

  “There is a use for everything,” she says with satisfaction.

  But Satomi can’t accept as Tamura accepts. The storms might be an act of nature, but she rails against them as though they are man-made, as though they are prescribed punishment from the government.

  “It makes me mad,” she tells Haru. “Those damn storms are like living things, with a will to spoil. Each one makes Mother a bit worse.”

  But Haru’s commiseration only makes her feel more helpless; his sympathy is passive, when what she wants is action.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do about them, Satomi. We all have to bear them, even the guards.”

  “You could get angry, maybe.”

  “You are a silly girl. Everything makes you mad. I don’t know why I bother with you.”

  For days after the storms blow out, Tamura and Satomi’s eyes burn, it hurts their mouths to eat. The dust creeps into their bedding so that their skin is sore from their grit-beds. No amount of shaking will get rid of it. There are times when Satomi fancies that the dust is stacking up inside her, slowly turning her into the fabric of Manzanar.

  Lone Pine, their nearest town, has a sprinkler wagon that settles the dust, and there is talk of the camp sharing it.

  “It ain’t that effective anyway,” the guard called Lawson, who talks with her sometimes, tells her. “It just damps down the sidewalk for a bit, that’s all.”

  “Still, it must be better than nothing, Lawson,” she says, enjoying how easily he is made to feel guilty.

  “You’ll get used to it, girl, we all do. Inyo weather is a law unto itself.”

  “You’d think the mountains would give some protection, but they don’t, do they?”

  “Nope, where you get mountains, you get extremes. But they’re pretty, ain’t they? Cigarette?” he always offers. She usually accepts.

  “I wouldn’t say pretty, exactly.”

  She can’t bring herself to admit it to him, but she is often moved, her heart filled to bursting, by the austere beauty of Manzanar. If she narrows her eyes and dismisses the clutter of the camp, she sees only the vast plains of the sky, the mountain peaks stabbing the clouds, inking them with indigo and purple and the kind of orange that Eriko calls burnt. In their jagged summits she conjures up church spires, and the roofscape of a city etched against the sky, a far-off Shangri-la.

  But there’s no escaping to that Shangri-la, there is no easy place to set her mind in Manzanar, there are no kind seasons to look forward to. It is a habitat of extremes that is always one thing or the other, too cold, too hot, too humid, it is never just right.

  “Change is good,” Lawson says. “Just when you think you can’t bear the cold anymore, it gets hot. Things move fast in earthquake country.”

  On a day in a hundred-degree summer, when the tar paper on their roof is melting, turning their barrack into a furnace that near e
nough cooks them, she takes her complaints to Dr. Harper.

  “My mother fainted clean away today, Dr. Harper. You could boil hot dogs on those barrack roofs.”

  “They faint in the mess hall lines too. We have always suffered hot summers here,” he says sympathetically.

  He thinks guiltily of the fans in his own house that his wife sets near bowls of ice to cool the air. There are no fans, there is no ice to be had in Manzanar.

  “It’s worse for my mother, she is so ill,” Satomi says. “Her chest never gets better and she is too thin. It is very hard on her.”

  “Why don’t you bring her to see me, Satomi? I would be happy to examine her, and I would like to meet her.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how stubborn she is, Dr. Harper. No one would. People love her sweetness; they can’t imagine how when she sets her will to something she can’t be moved.”

  “And she doesn’t want to come?”

  “No, she says she is getting better, but she isn’t. She isn’t one little bit better.”

  “Well, if she would allow me, I could visit your barrack. I would like to see what sort of mother grows a daughter like you.”

  Naomi Okihiro refuses to see Dr. Harper too, even though a strange pain overtakes her heart every now and then and her arthritis aches worse than a toothache as it sets her bones to stone. Sometimes it throbs in her so fiercely that she can’t get out of her chair, let alone make it to the spigot at the end of their alley.

  “Do you need water?” Satomi checks with her every afternoon.

  “No, I have plenty,” she lies, wanting only her daughter Eriko, to see to her needs.

  It is not uncommon for Eriko to return from work to find her mother so dehydrated that she can hardly speak. She must be wrapped in a wet sheet, made to sip water slowly until she returns to herself.

  “Things are getting worse with her,” Eriko says. “But she will not see a male doctor. She has her own way of doing things.”

  “Which is no way at all,” Satomi says. “I prefer more modern methods, myself.”

  She nags at Tamura until, running out of will, her mother agrees to go with her to the camp hospital.