“It don’t seem natural somehow, marrying an Oriental. God only knows what goes on in that house, what kinda life an American has to live under that roof.”
“It makes me sick just thinking about it.”
Scoffing at the idea of Japanese-Americans, has the world gone mad?, the townsfolk pump each other up, spew their dislike of anything Oriental into Angelina’s ether.
“One look and you can tell they ain’t trustworthy.”
“You ain’t never gonna find a Jap doctor, no matter how much you try to educate them. Don’t tell me that’s not the truth.”
Lately the irritant of having the Japanese around is grating nearer the bone. Japan is playing up, making itself felt, and not in a friendly way either. The townspeople have been holding their breath, waiting for trouble for months. Now they hear that the bastards are after their oil. Roosevelt is right. Why should America sell them oil? Why should America do anything to help them out?
The handful of liberals in town warn against sanctions.
“Only months to go before they run out of oil,” they say. “They’ll sure enough get aggressive then.”
“Let them. They’ll soon find out who’s boss.”
Immersed in his own world, the hostility of his neighbors hardly impinges on Aaron. He shrugs it off with an indifference that ruffles their feathers. He would have chosen to be Japanese if he could. Not the modern Japanese-American man that he feels is losing status, but the old-century kind, undisputed head of the family, obeyed in all things. He is entirely seduced by the idea of a strong man complemented by a subservient woman, a female who needs to rely on him. In Tamura he has found her, the girl who kneels before him smelling sweetly of rose oil, and eager to please.
“Do it this way, honey,” he says, just to see the admiration in her eyes. “It’s easy when you know how.” Or, “I’ll have coffee now,” so that he might hear her answer, “Yes, Aaron, I will get it right away.”
You can’t put a price on being master in your own home. He doesn’t need anyone or anything else to complete his world.
Tamura, though, is more sociable. She works at being liked, attempting to defuse rudeness with her sweet smile, her obliging nature. It hurts Satomi to see her trying so childishly to please.
“Your father reminds me of my own,” Tamura tells her in a whisper, fearful of bringing her family into the conversation, into their home, where it is an unspoken rule that they are not to be mentioned.
“I know that he is stern, but he is fair. And he is full of pride, and that is how a man should be. How else should a woman know who to be herself? I hope that one day you’ll find a husband as splendid as your father.”
Tamura knows how to be a wife, she learned it from her mother, learned how to meet a husband’s needs before he knew he had them. At night when his work is done, his dinner eaten, she massages Aaron’s shoulders, easing those muscles that he has asked too much of during the day. Dressed in her silky wrap, she sits at his feet, the dark fringe of her eyelashes shadowing her downy cheeks. She keeps the coffee coming and his Camel cigarettes lit, while he reads, a day late, his mail-sent copy of the Los Angeles Times.
Satomi thinks of those long night hours, the ones her mother calls the moon hours, as being endless and boring, full of her father’s demands, of which it seems to her there are far too many.
Aaron makes his regulations on the hoof. One day they are to pack the tomatoes this way, the next another—he decides randomly, and nothing is up for debate. Only he can make or break them.
“Dinner at the same time every day, honey, we know where we stand that way.”
He means exactly the same time each day. If Satomi is a minute late to the table, her meal goes in the trash. The girl has to learn who is important in the house, who waits for whom, who comes first.
“That’s the last wagashi cake,” Tamura warns nervously. “Best keep it for your father, you know how much he loves them.”
Inside the house Satomi has to wear the rough dust jackets that Tamura makes for her from twice-soaked flour sacks. The twine spurs in the weave scratch at her skin, leaving pinpricks of red on her arms.
“Yuck, they smell. I hate them,” she moans to Tamura. “It’s humiliating, like we’re peasants or something.”
“I will give them an extra rinse. Just wear them to please your father. He doesn’t ask much of you, and they save your dresses.”
“It doesn’t matter how many times you rinse them, they still smell like throw-up. Nobody I know has to wear such stupid things.”
It’s sandals only in the house. Aaron likes the sound of wood on wood. Satomi likes the sound too, but would never admit to it.
“Please, Satomi, put your hair up before your father comes home,” Tamura pleads, weary with having to appease them both.
In the times when she hates her father more than she cares to soothe her mother, she fights him on every rule, standing her ground, until Aaron, tired of the argument, picks her up as though she weighs nothing, as though she is nothing. He throws her on her bed, locking her in as he leaves.
It’s easy to escape her locked bedroom, hardly a jump at all from the crumbling window ledge. Outside with her book and her roll-ups, she sits with her back to the wall of the house, reading and smoking, one ear listening for Aaron’s heavy footfall along the hall. He is stubborn and it can be hours before he relents, before she hears him and she has to scramble back through the window and wait for the key to turn in the lock of her door.
“Can’t abide all his rules,” she tells Lily, shaking her hair loose, letting it spill around her shoulders in the way that Aaron has forbidden and her teacher Mr. Beck thinks unladylike. It’s the latest fashion and all the white girls are trying out the style.
“It makes us look older. Like movie stars,” Lily says hopefully.
Tamura too finds her own ways to skirt around Aaron’s rules, especially his ban on religion.
“Stories for simpletons,” he says. “That’s all the Bible is, that’s all any creed is. We don’t need religion in this house to tell us what’s right.”
As though in compensation for the loss of hers, Tamura concocts little ceremonies out of the offerings she makes to the birds that come to her kitchen door. She kneels to set the crumbs down, her body bowed in remembered prayer, her eyes closed as she loses herself in the ritual. The small thrill of disobedience that accompanies the act never fails to please.
It would have pained Aaron to see her kneeling so, to know that she is thinking of her family in Hawaii, remembering the life she lived there. As far as he is concerned Tamura and he might as well be one person, sharing the same desires, needing only each other to be whole. She came with him willingly, after all, gave herself over as women must. Men take wives, wives give allegiance, and new families are made, it isn’t something to be questioned.
If truth were known, he is glad that Tamura’s people are not part of their lives. He couldn’t have borne the intrusion of them. Propelled by his trusted inner compass, he keeps to the unquestioned path, defending himself against the idea that his wife might desire anything more than he provides for her.
Town is one of the few places where Tamura is able to express her choices without Aaron’s eye on her. He doesn’t care for the place: the bank four times a year, the odd visit for tractor parts, are enough for him. The year that he opened his bank account, his first season in profit, he had received a lukewarm invitation to join the local farmers’ cooperative and had declined.
“Just an excuse to gabble and guzzle beer,” he told Tamura.
With Satomi in tow, Tamura goes to Angelina once every couple weeks, driving the old farm truck as smoothly as the worn gears allow, just as Aaron has taught her. She picks up the farm’s supplies and her regular order of asahi rice to make the donburi with tuna that he says calms his digestion.
To Satomi’s relief her mother always dresses in Western clothes on their outings, smart nipped-in jackets and skirts cut on the bia
s that skim her slim calves. She is a fine dressmaker and doctors her old patterns to keep up with the latest styles.
“Too short for decency,” is Aaron’s habitual comment.
She wears the neatest little hats, feathered and netted creations that give her an air of sophistication. Satomi’s favorite, yet the one she suffers most embarrassment from, is a downy affair that sits on Tamura’s head at a rakish angle, bringing to mind a tiny bird preparing for flight.
Some women have a thing for shoes, for others it’s ribbons or lipstick, but hats are Tamura’s weakness. The moment one sits on her head her spirits are lifted, the color rises in her cheeks.
The townsfolk think she is putting on airs, while Aaron frets that she is making herself look ridiculous. He doesn’t care much for the clothes, but he hates the hats. Something about them makes him think of the world outside that he doesn’t want to know. Tamura wastes no time in changing as soon as she returns home.
“You look uncomfortable,” he says pointedly before she is even through the door. “All done up like a parcel.” It irks him that where her hats are concerned she won’t bend to his will. It’s a woman’s thing, he guesses.
Tamura orders the little creations from the dress shop’s catalogue when the annual sale makes them a bargain. She buys her dressmaking fabrics there too. With its pretensions to French fashion, the shop is always their first port of call in Angelina.
“How fine that striped cotton is, Satomi. You need a new dress. I have a lovely pattern at home, puff sleeves and a bow at the waist. You’ve never seen anything so pretty.”
“I’m not a child. Puffs and bows are for the elementary kids.”
“But bows are so pretty. You never like anything pretty.”
Tamura is right. Satomi has a horror of pretty, of puff sleeves and bows and complicated stitching. She likes plain cotton, simple shapes.
“Might as well be a boy,” Lily tells her. “There’s nothing as flattering as a frill.”
Artie agrees with Lily, he would like a frill or two, a ribbon, perhaps, in Satomi’s dark hair. It’s the way girls are meant to be, after all.
In Mr. Taylor’s drugstore they drink bubblegum sodas at the wooden counter and buy bags of mixed candies, strings of licorice, fruit sours, and mallow twists that they eat in the truck on their way home.
“You sure do like your candies,” Mr. Taylor says, opening the pack and adding one or two for goodwill. There’s something about Tamura that he likes, and it’s only good business, after all.
In the town’s general store Tamura is reminded of the one she grew up in. The smell of rice and ripe apples, of candied fruits and peppercorns, returns her momentarily to her happy childhood. She likes to linger there breathing it all in, stretching out the time in buying sealing wax and rubber bands, things that she has no real need of.
Her English is perfect, her manners so fine that she often gets a smile from the shopkeepers despite themselves. It is one thing to disapprove of her, the Jap wife, when she isn’t there, hard not to like her when she is.
So that Satomi might be fluent in both languages, she has spoken Japanese to her since her baby years. It pleases her that her daughter speaks the language of her own people so well, even though the rhythm of her American phrasing grates a little.
“It’s a mother’s duty to pass on such things,” she says. “Perhaps you will do it for your own daughter one day.”
“I’m not planning on having children. Lily says kids are nothing but trouble. I agree with her.”
“Oh, never mind Lily. You’ll want them when you meet the right man. We all do.”
Her eyes track Satomi’s long stride, she listens to her daughter’s words, and notes her restlessness with trepidation. Teaching Satomi Japanese has been a rare success; all else has failed. It isn’t in the girl’s nature to fade gracefully into the background, or to move modestly. She is always in a hurry, eating her food quickly, racing through her tasks.
“Can’t see why that girl’s so gingered up all the time. More boy than girl in her, if you ask me,” is Aaron’s take on it.
But although she never quite achieves the graceful body language of her mother, or the sweet tempo of Tamura’s voice, although a stranger might not have recognized the two as mother and daughter, there are things that are inherent. Sometimes she will turn her head just like Tamura, her hand brushing away the hair from her face in the same arresting movement. And often, if Aaron isn’t looking, he can hardly tell which one of them it is that he can hear laughing.
Like her mother, she can put her hair up without pins in one flowing movement and make a gleaming knot of it that sits nest-like on the nape of her neck. She has watched Tamura do it since infancy and guesses that it is one of those skills that, like skipping, once learned is never forgotten.
Mother and daughter are not obviously alike, but for all Tamura’s shyness, her gentle nature, there is a core of stubbornness in her makeup that is reflected in Satomi’s. It shows itself in her refusal to see that Satomi will never become the daughter her father expects her to be. It’s only a question of time, she thinks obstinately, it will sort itself in time.
“Slow down, take smaller steps,” she begs.
If what Aaron wanted wasn’t so important to her, she might see the spring of yearning in Satomi, the character that is already made. She might recognize in her daughter the bit of her husband’s nature that she admires so much.
Lately on their drives home, sneaking glances at Satomi’s full breasts, her tiny waist, and her long shapely legs, she muses on the fact that her daughter is hardly a child anymore. In no time at all she will be a young woman, lost to her. No doubt she will want to escape from under Aaron the first chance she gets.
Tamura’s longing for more children has never left her. Over the years since Satomi’s birth, she has ached for them. The thought now of losing her only one is made more painful for her by the absence of those others that never came.
“You don’t call me Mama anymore,” she says wistfully. “It’s always Mother these days.”
“I’m not a child anymore.”
“No, but you are not a woman yet either.”
The Draft
In the fall of 1940, Aaron receives his draft registration card. He has been expecting it, and even in the face of Tamura’s apprehension he can’t get vexed about it.
“It ain’t gonna come to much, honey,” he assures her. “They’re just ratcheting up the numbers.”
Talk of a spat with Japan has been around for months, but Aaron thinks it’s all hot air. He reads the warmongering articles in the Los Angeles Times as though they are works of fiction, written to stir up the readers, to keep them buying the paper for the next thrilling installment.
“We’ll have to show them who’s boss pretty soon” is a regular brag in Angelina, but somehow Aaron’s imagination won’t stretch to the possibility of what might be heading his way. It’s hard for him to accept that something he hasn’t ordered himself might influence his life.
In Angelina, though, the moment those draft cards sat on mantelpieces, the Baker family took on the stink of the enemy. Try as they might to ignore it, the family couldn’t fail to notice the now-open hostility shown toward them.
“Something’s changed, that’s for sure,” Aaron says. “I notice they’re not turning our business away, though. They’re just a bunch of hypocrites, always got to have someone to blame when things ain’t going their way.”
For Satomi the teasing at school has developed an uglier edge. Her fellow pupils strut around, mouthing off to her the things they have heard being said at home.
“Think we don’t know you’re a yella spy?” they taunt. “We don’t want your kind here.”
She fights her way through it. “As if I give a damn,” she says to Artie. “Sure, it’s tough, but not as tough as it is for the Japanese kids. They’re getting it bad.”
“We’re gonna whip you good,” the boys threaten them. “Don’t you
Japs know you can’t beat Americans?”
“We are Americans.” But their words are drowned in waves of jeering laughter.
“Looking like the enemy doesn’t make them the enemy,” Satomi insists to Lily. “Don’t let me see you joining in the baiting.”
To her own surprise, coming across the school bully Mike Loder, who is twisting the arm of a Japanese girl who hasn’t made way for him in the hall, she finds herself ready, wanting to act.
Mike’s voice is high, pumped up with a venomous hatred. He is so full of himself that he might as well be thumping his chest with his fists. Look at how important I am compared to you.
“Stand aside next time, Jap. Get it?” He is leering into the girl’s face, his own fat one shining with sweat and excitement.
“Why should she, Mike? You stand aside.” Satomi grabs at his shirt, pulling him away from the girl. “What’s so special about you?”
“Keep out of this. Keep your half-caste nose out of it.” He shoves her hard so that she stumbles, hitting the side of a locker, grazing her arm, and banging her cheekbone on its metal edge.
After, she can’t remember how it happened, what had propelled her fist into Mike’s face, or the pain she felt when he returned the blow. She remembers, though, feeling good, not caring that she is in for it with Mr. Beck. Something about her action, her getting involved, has made her feel that she is safe in her own hands.
Aaron, checking the bruises on her cheek, the raw graze on her arm, says it’s no big deal.
“You’ve had worse,” he says. “Still, that kid needs a lesson.”
Next day she is embarrassed to see him at the school gates.
“Start walking home, girl. I’ll catch you up in the truck.”
Outside the gate she waits and sees him buttonhole Mike Loder, hears his voice steady and menacing.
“See this fist, boy?”
“Yes, Mr. Baker.” Mike’s pigeon eyes look wary, his voice little more than a squeak.
“You touch my girl again, any girl, you’re gonna see it close up.”
Mike hangs his head, studying the ground, shucking his foot against a broken bit of asphalt. He thinks he might just kick out, get a good hit at Old Man Baker’s shin before running off. He’s not sure he can pull that off, though, and he has had enough of mixing it with the Bakers.