A Girl Like You

  It’s a pleasure he savors, dipping each one first into the clam broth, then into the little tin pot of melted butter that comes on the side.

  Sitting next to him, with the sound of the gulls bullying, the warmth of his thigh against hers as he helps himself to her fries, Manzanar it seems to her was a time in the life of a different girl. Finding Cora is not so much forgotten as put on hold. It’s a honeymoon period for her and Abe. She is slipping into place, no longer defined by her experiences in the camp.

  “I can’t believe that I have found you,” she says. “Just when I wasn’t looking.”

  “It was meant,” he says simply.

  Back in New York, the heat in mid-July is still fierce. Abe, after having her to himself in Freeport, is reluctant for her to contact Joseph.

  “We have our life, honey. It just doesn’t fit with his.”

  “I have to keep in touch with him, Abe. Asking me not to see Joseph is like me asking you not to see your mother. It’s cruel.”

  Their first real argument, though, comes not over Joseph but about Satomi wanting to work.

  “You didn’t mind living off Joseph’s money.” He would take the words back if he could. They are unfair and he knows the truth of it.

  “I worked for most of the time I was with him,” she defends herself, hurt by Abe’s tone. “In any case, Abe, it’s not the same thing at all. I’m lonely here with you gone all day.”

  “I don’t want you working, Sati,” he says flatly. “I can support my wife, I should think.”

  When she greets him with the news that she’s taken a job, as a receptionist at the Bridge Hotel, near his hospital, a frown flits briefly across his brow before he raises his hands to heaven and gives in. She won’t be ordered, and he loves that about her. She can’t be anyone other than who she is.

  “I don’t like you working, honey, but if it’s what you want …”

  “You’ll hardly notice it, Abe. And it’s not forever. Just until we settle, start a family.”

  The words “settle,” “start a family” wrap themselves around her. They’re imbued with warmth, with normality. She likes that the language of her world has changed to that of the all-American girl.

  Joseph comes to the hotel, winces at the sight of her behind the desk, at the cheap plastic name badge on her dress. His face is a little drawn. He is a few pounds lighter than when she last saw him. He has had trouble finding the hotel, since the cab dropped him on the wrong street. He walked three blocks out of his way before discovering the mistake.

  She has no name for the sweet feeling that floods her at the sight of him. Perhaps it’s what a sister would feel after not seeing a loved brother for a while.

  “God, you look healthy,” he says. “But I can’t say those clothes do much for you. You look like a schoolteacher.”

  “I like this dress, its Abe’s favorite.”

  “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Out of the Manhattan village, he’s a tree unearthed, too elegant for the sullied midtown territory that she now inhabits. His imported Savile Row suit is fine worsted wool, his soft brogues of obvious quality. He’s tanned from his European tour and it gives him a slightly racy look. She remembers the first time that she saw him and had thought him vain. She knows better now: his extreme neatness is his shield, the meniscus he puts between himself and the world.

  “I’m getting used to life without you, I suppose.” He sighs. “But New York is not the same. I need pastures new, feel the urge to be off again.”

  Since her wedding he has been working on the Cora thing. No news yet, but he gives her his latest report, all neatly typed up. Families who have adopted Japanese children have been contacted, there are letters from the governor’s office with assurances that they will search records but can promise nothing. It’s suggested that they should look farther afield, out of the state if need be.

  “Anything from Dr. Harper?” he asks.

  “Nothing, only that he thinks her name might have been changed, as he can’t find a record anywhere of any Cora. It’s as though she has disappeared from the world.”

  “She’ll turn up, dear girl.” He touches her cheek lightly. “Oh, and believe it or not, Hunter is getting married. A Connecticut family, one of the Harrison girls, Laura. You met her on Fishers Island, remember? She’s been sweet on him since they were kids. His family is pleased.”

  “I’m pleased too. Lucky girl, to have Hunter.”

  “You’ll come to the wedding, of course?”

  “Well, it’s not Abe’s sort of thing, and he doesn’t like me going places without him.” She can feel herself blushing.

  “And what Abe says, goes?”

  “Do you really think I’ve changed that much?”

  “Well, I live in hope that you haven’t. You look the same, although rather like a rare orchid in a tin can behind that desk. It’s quite upsetting. Let me take you to lunch.”

  “Okay, I’d like that, but nowhere too smart. One of us has to look out of place, so it might as well be you. Somewhere that would suit a schoolteacher would be best, don’t you think?”

  The offer of a job with the Long Island hospital group comes out of the blue and Abe jumps at the chance.

  “We can live in Freeport, buy a house, have our babies. What do you say?”

  He hadn’t needed to ask, they both knew the answer to that.

  He would take up the position in December—time enough to pack up and give notice at the apartment, to honor his contract at the hospital, and for them to find a home of their own in Freeport.

  “You can start looking for a house right away,” he says. “Give up your job and stay with Frances. She’ll love helping us find the right thing. I’ll come every spare moment I get.” He will miss her, but he will be sending her home, putting her somewhere safe, somewhere away from Joseph. The light of their future is beckoning, and he can’t wait to be done with the city.

  “It’s a wonderful piece of luck, Sati.”

  “So wonderful,” she agrees, even though she doesn’t want to leave. Joseph is hardly a threat, and she would rather stay with Abe in Queens until they are ready to move.

  There is something confirming, though, in the idea of being in Abe’s childhood home, of finding a house of their own, waiting with his mother for him to return to them. Tamura had told her once that women must get used to waiting.

  “Work and wars, Satomi,” she had said. “It’s the women who wait.”

  In Abe’s childhood bed she wakes periodically through the night, gauging the time by the depth of darkness, the quality of the light seeping through the curtains from the sea. Will she ever be able to sleep comfortably on her own again?

  In his boyhood room, full of boyish things that Frances can’t bear to get rid of, her clothes are squashed up tight against Abe’s outgrown ones in the small wardrobe. There are pictures of sailboats on the walls, balsa-wood planes hanging on strings from the ceiling, a baseball nestled in its glove on a shelf, as though waiting for Abe to pick up the game where he left it off.

  Among the debris of his childhood there hardly seems room for her. A photograph of Wilson as a puppy, jumping for a ball, ears flying, jostles for space on the small bedside table alongside a picture book on sailing, and two huge pebbles with the faint tracery of fossils inking their surface. She puts the book and the stones in a box under his bed, and the well of her memory is taken to that other bed she put a box under all those years ago. Shoving aside his puzzles, the miniature tool set, and a browning pile of comics, she swallows hard and attempts to banish the memory of that day, of that Angelina girl.

  “Move anything you like,” Frances had said lightly, but didn’t tell her where she might move it to.

  When Abe comes on his precious time off, the bed is too narrow for the both of them. They lie knotted together, close and uncomfortable. He pretends not to mind, she does too.

  “It’s cozy,” he says.

  “Mmm.”

 
It’s nothing against Frances, but she feels stifled being in such close quarters with someone she hardly knows. There is something of camp living in it that unsettles her. And she has noticed how Abe becomes more of a son than a husband in his mother’s house. She misses having him to herself, misses the apartment. The need to find a place of their own is urgent in her.

  “I’ll go with whatever you choose,” Abe says. “Long as it doesn’t break the bank.”

  When she finds it on the fifth house viewed, it’s obvious to her that it’s the one. The day is dazzlingly bright, the noon sun high, the late summer day hot, yet the salt marshes on which the house sits appear to her like fields of pure untrodden snow.

  “It looks solid enough,” Frances says, seeing Satomi’s delight.

  It will blow their budget, so they will have to decorate it themselves, make do on the furnishings, but it’s perfect.

  “Square-built. Nineteen twenties, I guess,” Frances says.

  Satomi loves the unadorned frontage that belies the charm of its spacious interior. There isn’t much of a garden, but you can see the ocean from all sides, and the rooms are filled with light.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  “A lot of upkeep,” Frances says. “And nothing much will take in the ground here. The salt, you see.”

  When Abe comes home on the weekends their time is spent decorating, sanding down the woodwork, peeling off the dark wallpaper, painting the rooms in soft grays and blues, the colors of the ocean.

  They make love on a blanket on the floor, the smell of paint and ozone mingling in the air. The urge, frequent and overwhelming, can’t be resisted.

  “We’ll move in as soon as the bed comes,” Abe says. “What more do we need?”

  “So many things.” She laughs, picturing them sleeping in a big comfortable bed with cotton covers, a crib by the side of it.

  “We’ll be in by the end of the month,” he says, and kisses her. “Wish we could have Wilson with us here, but it wouldn’t be fair to take him.”

  “A puppy of our own, then?” she suggests.

  “I guess.”

  The windows of the salt marsh house are open in the day to the tang of the marshes. There are drapes now at the windows, a sparse assortment of furniture in the rooms, and Frances has donated two rag rugs. The house has become a home.

  There’s no picket fence around her salty garden, and she refuses to wear an apron, but she is assuming the identity of the suburban, middle-class American wife, loving it so much that Manzanar has retreated to the less conscious part of her mind. She is hit by the certainty of love, by the contrast of her life with Abe to the unreal time she had spent with Joseph.

  She gets a card for the local library, does her marketing at the store that Frances shops in, even has a laundry day. Frances is teaching her to cook Abe’s favorite dishes, pickled beets and creamed codfish, broiled chicken and cornbread. People seeing her with Frances include her in their greeting, begin to recognize her when she is on her own. She sees the reserve in them still, but doesn’t mind so much. She believes Abe when he tells her it’s the same for all newcomers in Freeport. It takes time, that’s all.

  “Before you know it,” Frances says, “you’ll be a local.”

  They have Abe’s best friend, Don, and his girlfriend over for dinner, and Abe helps her roast a chicken and she attempts a pear pie. She’s a wife like any other. She’s happy.

  Abe sees and loves the difference in her. She’s all his now, apart from those irritating times when she comes to stay overnight with him in the city, and hooks up with Joseph while he’s at work. He doesn’t mind so much anymore the idea of Cora. That unreachable bit of Satomi, the times when she seems remote from him, has to do with Cora, he thinks. He would like to find Cora too now, to see Satomi at peace.

  In their city bed his passion spills over so that he is not always tender. She doesn’t know, as Abe himself doesn’t know, that it’s payback for Joseph. But she’s as eager, as demanding as him for it. When he falls asleep across her, she revels in the intimacy of his trust, his sharp after-sex scent. She bears without complaint the weight of him until he chooses to roll away from her.

  She is determined not to let the camp impinge on their life, or allow the odd socialite life she had led with Joseph damage them. To make a balance sheet of what is gained, what lost, would be mad. She will be grateful, ignore that contradictory thing that stirs in her heart when memories of Cora are evoked. The girl who was Satomi Baker is lying low under the identity of Mrs. Abe Robinson.

  At Abe’s request she goes to the city to bring back the last of their things from the apartment. He has to work and the new tenants are eager to take possession. She packs their linen, her books, and the toaster they bought because the grill on the old cooker had stopped working. There’s the tin tray illustrated with the New York skyline, and some cream china cups with gold rims that they found together in a bric-a-brac store. There’s the silver-framed photograph of their wedding, Abe’s binoculars, the alarm clock.

  Abe has a week on nights and will sleep in one of the on-call rooms in the hospital.

  “It’s torture being apart,” he says, kissing her.

  “Worse than torture,” she groans.

  They sleep in the apartment for the last time, picnicking on sweet rolls and potato chips, making love in the creaky bed with its cheap mattress.

  “We won’t miss it,” Abe says.

  But she can’t let go of the ache of leaving. She will never get used to endings.

  Abe puts her on the train to Freeport, hauling the packed suitcases onto the rack above her seat in the empty compartment.

  “You’ll need someone to help you down with those at the other end.”

  “I’m stronger than you think, Abe.”

  “I know it, honey. You are strong and I love you. Still, find someone to help you with them anyway. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  His kiss is firm, without passion, she’s disappointed. She can tell he is distracted, wants to be on his way.

  “Only a few days before I’ll be home for the holiday,” he says. “I’ll get the earliest Hempstead train I can, and be with you before you know it.”

  “Time to wish away,” she says.

  “Frances makes such a big deal of Thanksgiving you’re not going to believe it. She’ll love having you to show off to.”

  “I’ve had enough of missing you, Abe.”

  “I’ll be home before you know it.”

  She hangs her head out of the window, holding on to the sight of him as he pauses, waving briefly, before striding to the exit. He hates goodbyes, she knows. There’s pleasure in knowing what he hates, goodbyes and new shirts, ginger chocolate, milk in his coffee, surprises.

  She knows him as he knows her, and everything is as it should be. But as he disappears from her view a feeling of melancholy invades her, and for a moment she debates leaving the train, catching up with him, the pair of them laughing at her silliness. But the train is already moving. It’s love, she supposes; with love comes the feeling that every minute apart you are risking something.

  “Just till Thanksgiving,” she comforts herself. “Just till Thanksgiving.”

  Penn Station to Babylon

  On Thanksgiving eve Frances is in the thick of it. She hasn’t been able to keep the smile from her face all day. The oven’s heat at full blast is fierce; a fresh-baked chocolate cake is cooling on the table, pumpkins are on the boil, steaming up the windows so that she has to open the door to let the cool air in. It reminds her of last year and all the years before, when she has done the same. Only this year it feels different, nicer, she has to admit. She has Satomi with her, Abe’s Satomi, and now she needn’t worry about him anymore, he has found his girl.

  “Give those cranberries a stir, will you, Sati? I think they’re beginning to stick.”

  The candied smell of the simmering berries, of the sweet pumpkins that she will mash to velvet for her special p
ie, spice the air.

  “I want to get all this out of the way before Abe gets home. We always have hamburgers with my tomato relish on the night before Thanksgiving, and I haven’t even started on them yet.”

  “I can’t imagine ever being able to cook like you, Frances.”

  “Oh, you’re learning. And I bet you already have a few of your own traditions.”

  “I don’t know, maybe. We always have a drink on deck after we have put the boat to bed.” She flushes at the thought of what else they do, but that is hardly for Frances’s ears. “And we never go to sleep on an argument, if you mean that sort of thing. But nothing to do with food, Abe is still a better cook than me. He often cooks for himself in the city.”

  “Good heavens, does he? I’ve only ever known him to heat beans.”

  Both women fall silent as they picture him in their minds. Frances summons her big broad boy waving to her as he comes into harbor, a bitter-sweet reminder of his father. Satomi feels rather than sees his presence, the bulk of him, firm lips, strong hands, that odd contrast of feelings he induces in her, safe and risky at the same time.

  “Oh, my God, the turkey.” Frances’s face is flushed, she is hot, excited. There’s nothing like getting ready for Thanksgiving to gin things up.

  “We have to cover it with bacon, give it a coat of maple syrup to sit in overnight.”

  “This Thanksgiving stuff is a real workout, isn’t it?”

  “Didn’t your mother do it?”

  “Not really, my father didn’t care for turkey. He preferred my mother’s Japanese dishes. The mess hall in the camp made an effort, but it was hard to be thankful there, even for the patriotic ones.”

  “And you didn’t feel patriotic?”

  “No, not the slightest bit. I spent my whole time at Manzanar angry or afraid. I never felt like celebrating.”

  “And now?”

  “Oh, now everything is different. I want to celebrate with you and Abe, be thankful.”

  “Where were you last Thanksgiving?”

  “We were at the Yacht Club at Fishers Island, Joseph and me, and his best friend, Hunter. He loves it there in the winter and it’s smart to be at Fishers for the holiday.” She wishes she hadn’t said it. The words have a show-off, brittle feel to them.