In her daydreams Lily has Satomi running away from home, or dying quickly from some rare disease. She pictures disfiguring scabs, bad breath, sees herself comforting Artie, him falling for her.
In those daydreams Lily stars as the beauty; in reality she worries that her lips might be a bit too thin, her legs too up-and-down. She likes the dainty little maps of freckles across her cheeks, though, comforts herself that, better late than never, her breasts have started to grow. And one day she swears to God she is going to dye her mousy hair bright blond; then let Satomi watch out.
And I am white, after all, just like Artie, she reminds God in her prayers. It would be better all around.
Jealous she may be, but Lily knows that however much the boys might puppydog after Satomi, she will never be the one for keeps. You can’t take a half-caste home to your mother and say this is the one. All she has to do is play the waiting game. Artie’s bound to come to his senses.
“I don’t think we can be friends if you go to third base with Artie,” Lily threatens. “They’ll tar me with the same brush as you, and I don’t want people thinking I’m like my cousin. They’ll say it runs in the family.”
“Fine, Lily, I’ll let you know when the time comes. You can drop me then.”
But Lily will never drop her. They’ll be best friends forever, she’s sure of it. And Lily’s advice is meant well, she’s only trying to help, to save her from herself. It seems to Satomi that Lily knows the rules for everything. She marvels at how she lists them with such confidence:
“Red shoes are common.”
“Eating in the street is cheap.”
“Never, ever wear white after Labor Day.”
Lily likes to think that one day she will have the kind of life where the rules matter. She gathers in the little nuggets of what she thinks of as wisdom, from advertisements, and the radio, and from the hand-me-down magazines her mother is given by the undertaker’s wife she cleans for. She plans never to break the rules herself, they are as true for her as though she has read them in the Bible. She holds dear to the belief of the inexperienced, that there is such a thing as natural justice. Follow the rules and reap the rewards, is her motto.
Despite Lily’s misgivings, Satomi longs for red shoes, finds seductive the idea that a home run might change things forever. Change is good, isn’t it? Why wait for things to happen? Left to their own devices, they might never.
Those thrilling embraces, the weight of Artie as they lay together in the woods, the smell of leaf mold and fern in the air, keep from her mind Lily’s warnings and the tale of Dorothy’s downfall. She may not be ready to allow a home run, but everything else is up for grabs.
“Oh, God, you smell so good,” Artie croons as he lights two cigarettes with one match shielded in his hand against the breeze.
“You’ve got to give me some sugar.”
“Oh, you get plenty of sugar, Artie.”
“You know what I mean, Sati. Sure you do.”
He takes a long drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke escape through his nose, and hands hers to her in the way he has seen it done in the movies.
“I want us to go all the way. You know I’m going to marry you, no matter what anyone says.”
“Oh, that’s big of you, Artie. But don’t count on me saying yes.”
“Come on, course you will. Guys like me don’t come by the dozen.”
“Hmm.”
She isn’t even sure that she likes Artie that much, but his embraces excite her, they induce the sweetest tingling of her skin, and strange little leaps of longing that keep her blood singing. Lured by the meaty bulk of his body, the urgency in him, it’s hard sometimes not to go all the way. But it’s her own fears, not Lily’s, that stop her. She may not like it, but there’s something of her father in her that won’t bend. Artie can go his own sweet way if he wants. It’s her rules or no game.
“What’s so great about Artie Goodwin?” one boy after another asks. “He’s soft as shit. You want more than that, don’t you?”
“I don’t want any of you, that’s for sure.”
“Who says we’re asking?”
“Oh, you’re asking.”
She and Artie figure big in the schoolyard gossip. Her reputation is taking a hit, while his remains intact. She may have Jap in her, but she’s a looker, and he’s just doing what guys do.
“They think they know what’s going on,” she tells Lily. “Boy, do they have vivid imaginations.”
“Can’t blame ’em for getting ideas,” Lily says caustically. “You and Artie gotta be getting up to something in those woods.”
“Yeah, swimming and smoking.” She grins. “Real wicked, eh?”
These days, though, when Artie puts his hand up her skirt, she lets it wander until it reaches the soft skin at the top of her thigh, lets him pull a little on the leg elastic of her panties. The sense she has that she might be carried away and let it happen feels dangerous and exciting.
“Don’t be a tease, Sati, nobody likes a tease,” Artie pants.
“I’m not teasing, I’m serious.”
“I’m serious too, pretty damn serious.”
“Pretty damn serious, pretty damn serious,” she mimics, until, red in the face, Artie rolls sulkily away from her.
“I don’t know what makes you think you’re so fine. I could have any girl I want, you know?”
She guesses it’s the truth. He’s a charmer for sure. A charmer with a rolling swagger, and the sort of hard body that stirs up girls’ insides, gives them that dull ache.
“Think yourself lucky, Sati,” he says. “You’ve got your drawback, that’s for sure. I’m out on a limb, with you for a sweetheart.”
Despite Artie’s misgivings, he is relieved and a little alarmed when on her fifteenth birthday she accepts his class ring. You can never be sure how Sati will react to things. That day, though, as if she is rewarding him, she lets him unbutton her blouse and pull her brassiere straps down from her shoulders. She lets him cup her breasts with his farm-boy hands.
He closes his eyes, feeling as though he is sinking into himself, into a sweet safe place. It feels so good he could cry, but all he says is, “They’re great, really great.”
Letting Artie touch her bare breasts feels to her like giving a child one sweet too many. You feel generous and it keeps them quiet for a bit, but sugar gets them excited and you know you’ll pay for it later. For sure the more Artie gets, the more he wants.
She won’t tell Lily, no point in getting her in a stew. She’ll show her the ring and say it’s nothing serious. It’s going steady but just for now.
Artie, though, can’t keep his mouth shut. “You ain’t seen nothing like them,” he tells the boys. “Not a girl here to match them. Round and firm, and the scent of her like those big red apples. It’s enough to drive you nuts.”
“Hand her over when you’ve finished,” they joke crudely.
“She’s out of your league,” he boasts.
“Yeah, from another fuckin’ continent.”
Much as Artie thinks himself a catch, the big mover and shaker, his school reports confirm that he is lazy, middling at pretty much everything he takes on.
Artie’s trouble, Mr. Beck writes in his neat handwriting, is that he is ambitious without being dedicated. He expects things to be handed to him on a plate. He must learn that effort brings success, or he will continue to fail.
Artie laughs at the reports. What does a dried-up old guy like Mr. Beck know, anyway?
Mr. Beck, though, is a fine judge of boys, he knows what he’s talking about. Satomi too senses Artie’s weakness. He’s full of want, but too lazy to work at things.
“Life doesn’t owe you,” she says when Artie annoys her with his boasts, when he tells her what a big success he’s going to be once he gets to the city.
Artie’s all for getting out of Angelina. He wants the big city, the hustle and bustle, lights and music. He wants the chance of a life that doesn’t include dirt u
nder his fingernails. And he wants the prize of Satomi Baker, wants her to give in, to go all the way. He feels lucky, he’s good looking with that “it” thing going on, life owes him, he’s just waiting for it to pay up.
Artie might not be Mr. Beck’s favorite, but he’s popular among his classmates. In his sixteenth year, he’s the best-looking, the tallest, the funniest, the most popular. If his friends want him along, it means that Satomi comes too.
“See, Sati, whatever you say, you’re just as popular as me.”
“Oh, sure, Artie, course I am.”
But as cool as she likes to think herself about Artie, life is better with him than without. Him wanting her, when the girls who excluded her want him, makes a sort of balance. Even Lily’s jealousy, her little digs, can’t spoil the fun she has with Artie.
“Let’s not go to school today. I’ll write your note, you write mine.”
“Artie, it’ll be the third time this month. We won’t get away with it for much longer.”
“Who cares, we’ll be leaving soon anyway. You have to do what you want in life, enjoy it while you can.”
On their way to the woods they steal soft-shell peas from Cromer’s fields near the water hole, fruit from the orchards, sinking their teeth into ripe peaches, and the sweet red strawberries that set themselves at the woods’ edge. There is something of the waning summer in those fruits, something lush and fertile and close to decay.
“A smoke before or after?” Artie asks.
“After what, for heaven’s sake?”
“A swim, I suppose, after a swim.”
It’s Artie, not her, who squeals at their submersion into the cold river; Artie who won’t swim out to the deep because he might get caught up in the weeds that grow there. She can’t help but sneer as she grins and swims out past him.
“Chicken.”
“Fool.”
They smoke Lucky Strikes when they can get them, roll-ups when they can’t. She likes the roll-ups better. The ritual of opening the little tin of tobacco, the crisp feel of the white tissue, the earthy smell as they light up, unclenches some tautness in her.
She knows what he means by “after,” of course. It’s what Lily with her mouth all twisted up calls “making out.”
“You’ll get yourself a reputation,” Lily warns. “You don’t want that, do you?”
“Thought I already had one.” Satomi winks at her outraged friend.
Much as Artie wants to be with her, he doesn’t care for the woods, they are too feral for his liking. He has a deep fear of snakes, of all wild things. The slightest rustle in the undergrowth has him jumping.
“No animals in the city,” he says. “Just jazz clubs and bars and the streets all lit up. And coffee shops on every corner and the latest movies, no measuring out the water, no having to eat the bruised crop that you can’t sell.”
“Yeah, I know, all the men are handsome and all the girls pretty and dressed up smart all the time,” she can’t help teasing him, even though the pictures Artie conjures up are exciting.
But Artie’s dreams are not hers. She hasn’t worked hers out yet. Unlike him, she loves the woods, the sweet green stillness of them, the strange shadows that play there, and the mossy scent that stays in the air for days after a storm. They are lovely to her in every season.
In her childhood years she had played in them, never afraid to be by herself under the lacy canopy of the tall ghost pines. She loves the way the light filters through their needles, the clean scent of them. And in winter, when the wind sweeps through their boughs, their creaking moans keep her from being lonely. Angelina’s woods hold only magic for her.
Once, at dusk, she had seen a fox in them. It had stood big as a dog, alert but motionless by the porcelainberry bush that was hung with poisonous drupes. Its thick musky smell had come to her on the breeze before she saw it staring, working out whether she posed a threat or not. She had held the creature’s gaze with a pounding heart, the hairs on her arms standing on end, amazed and scared at its closeness. It had turned its head from her, sniffing the air, and then, looking back, had given her a wild stare before trotting away.
“Don’t mention it to your father,” Tamura advised. “He will want to shoot it, you will only get upset. He has to protect the chickens, of course, but …”
In the woods’ cool clearings she picks armfuls of the rough apple mint that grows around the base of the big sitting rocks and that must be strewn on the packing-shed floor to keep the rats out.
“Better mice than rats any day,” Aaron says.
And in the early morning when the light is new and the scent of the juniper like incense on the air, her mother sends her to pick mushrooms in their season. Tamura calls the little flesh-colored cups “kinoko,” the children of the trees.
Torn between love and embarrassment, Satomi secretly delights in her mother’s little sayings. In later years she will know that her heart lived in her mother, she will regret not having hugged to her childhood self the unique charm of Tamura.
All her life she will be drawn to woods, but none of them will ever quite match up to the fragrant forest of Angelina, where she and Artie practiced how to be grown-up together.
“You’re exotic, that’s what you are,” Artie says, as though complimenting her, as though isn’t he just the clever one to give that description to her.
Without knowing why, she doesn’t like the sound of “exotic.” The word has too much heat in it, a low sort of intimacy. It isn’t the first time she has been called that, and it doesn’t feel like flattery to her.
Mr. Beck, a man torn between duty and impropriety when it comes to Satomi, told her once that he found her exotic.
“Know what ‘exotic’ means, Satomi?”
“Different, I guess.”
“It means someone not native to a country. Someone poles apart from yourself.”
“I’m as American as you, Mr. Beck.”
“I meant it as a compliment, girl. Learn how to take a compliment.”
But she can’t take Mr. Beck’s advice seriously. It isn’t impartial, that’s for sure. For one thing, he is unreliable, one minute singling her out for his favors, the next picking on her for punishment. He trembles more than she does when giving her ten strokes on the palm of each hand, his odd smile disturbing her more than the pain he inflicts. He is always including himself in her world, flattering her, intervening in her fights, touching her. She wishes he would get off her case.
“You know, Satomi, you have a kinda disturbing beauty, the kind that could get you into trouble. It sure can open things up for you, but it can cut you out of them too. My advice to you would be to study hard, so that you aren’t tempted to rely on it.”
“Thanks, Mr. Beck, that’s good advice, I guess.”
But without effort she is always somewhere near the top of the class. English comes easy, but she wings her way in math, copying Lily’s neatly worked-out sums. Lily sure knows how to count.
“Why waste your time on schoolwork?” Artie says. “Your looks are as good as currency.”
She can’t see it herself. Some crooked thing inside won’t let her see it.
If mirrors could talk, hers would say, This is who you are. You have your mother’s long eyes, only wider and a little lighter, more the color of the bark of the Bryony that grows wild by the sheds; your hair is long and thick, and looks black unless you are standing next to your mother, where in the comparison it is dark, dark brown. You have your father’s lips, cushion-full and faintly tinted as though with salmonberry. And your skin, the color of white tea, is smooth and finely pored. Your flaws are the stubborn set to your mouth, that look of refusal that stalks your eyes.
If offered the choice, instead of her dark eyes, her mother’s smile, she would have chosen to look fuller, lush, and plumped up like those freckled Californian girls. A regular American.
“There are many different kinds of Americans,” Tamura says, catching sight of Satomi posing in front of the mi
rror, a yellow scarf draped as hair on her head. “Ask your Japanese friends at school. They are as American as your father, as Lily. We are all good Americans.”
She doesn’t have the heart to tell Tamura that she rarely speaks to the Japanese pupils. She doesn’t care to, and they don’t mix that much, don’t seek her out. Apart from Saturdays when she and Lily see them on their way to their Japanese-language lessons, they are rarely met outside of school. Even when the carnival came to town, when the Ferris wheel beckoned and the sweet smell of cotton candy got all jumbled up in your head with the fairground music and the strutting boys, they were nowhere to be seen.
In any case, Tamura herself hardly talks to the Japanese. She may give a greeting when she sees them in town, but she never stops to talk. It would be pointless making friends; Aaron wouldn’t like it, no matter if they are Japanese or not. Even on the rare occasions when Elena comes he is put in a bad mood for hours.
At school with Lily, Satomi talks the latest talk, chews gum, and thinks American thoughts. At home, in the vine-covered wooden house that sits back from the single-track road, a mile or so from town, there is no escaping the Japanese half of her. She knows the rules of both her worlds, moves between them with what seems like ease. Yet something in her struggles to find out which life she is playacting. It never occurs to her that it might be both.
In their small community, the Bakers stand out. Feeling neither fish nor fowl, it’s hard to know where to place themselves. The Japanese feel uneasy with them, advise their children to keep their distance. They’ve heard the gossip, judge Satomi’s behavior as haji. She brings shame on her family, a thing not to be borne. They’re schooled in family loyalty over the individual, in ritualistic good manners, so obedience is second nature to them. What kind of girl goes alone to the river with a boy after all?
The whites made their judgments on the Bakers the moment they hit town. If anything, they have grown more suspicious of them, of Aaron in particular.
“I hear they eat raw fish. Snake too when they can get it.”