The waiting for that different life would be fine if only the thought of war didn’t prey on her mind so much, if only she didn’t fear Japan. The schoolyard talk is full of lurid descriptions of the cruelties that the Japanese bastards will inflict if they get the upper hand. Panic rises in her chest when she thinks about the yellow peril.
The occasional blink of a plane’s taillight heading off into the night sets her to imagining foreign lands, lives lived more excitingly than her own. One day maybe something wonderful will happen and she will be on that plane. She will see deserts, and beaches with pink sand, and all the places Mr. Beck has told them about in geography.
“You’re not the only one who wants to get out,” she tells Artie. “I’m not going to get stuck in Angelina for the rest of my life. I want to see the world too.”
“We could go to Los Angeles,” Artie offers. “It’s got to be the best place on earth.”
“Who told you that?”
“Oh, people talk, things get around. No place on earth like Los Angeles, they say.”
“You don’t want to travel far, then, Artie?”
“No need.”
In the space when she is not thinking about letting Artie go, or of the Japs coming to get them, she takes the time to notice that the house is unpleasantly quiet without Aaron, that the fields are weedy at the edges, that her mother is filled with sadness.
Tamura has become listless, as though while waiting for Aaron’s return she has gone into slow motion. She works the land every day, exhausting labor even with Satomi’s help. Yet without shirts to wash and boots to clean, she feels at a loss. Being a creature of habit, she cooks the same meals, serves them on the same day of the week that Aaron had insisted on. But she can’t be bothered with the finer details and the meals seem flavorless to Satomi.
“No more soba noodles, please, Mama. You don’t like them much, I hate them, what’s the point?”
But as though bad luck will follow if she doesn’t, as though some link between her and Aaron will be severed, Tamura goes on making the noodles that only Aaron likes. The velvety dough sticks to her hands, little flecks of it settle in her hair like snow-flakes. It’s a messy business, familiar and somehow comforting.
“Fat white worms, horrible soft gloopy things,” Satomi complains to Artie. “I just can’t bring myself to swallow them. Can’t think why Father likes them so much.”
She longs for hamburger, for steak, but never asks for them.
Used to having Aaron to guide her, Tamura turns to Satomi for confirmation of every decision she makes. It seems to Satomi that overnight mother and daughter roles have been reversed. Tamura is letting go, happy for her to be in charge.
When she notices that her mother has started squinting, she has to force Tamura to town for the sight test with the visiting optician. The steel-rimmed prescription glasses that Tamura receives a month later make her look older than her forty years.
“I won’t wear them in front of your father.” She grimaces into the mirror. “They make me look like my mother.”
“Well, your mother sure must have been pretty,” Satomi soothes. “Was she?”
Tamura doesn’t answer. Since Aaron left it seems more important than ever to her to stick to his rules, to the pact they had made all those years ago. The old families, as Aaron has labeled them, as though they are some long-lost ancient dynasty, must remain in the past.
With twenty-twenty vision restored, Tamura sets about polishing.
“Why didn’t you tell me things were getting so dusty?”
“I didn’t notice, Mother.”
“Oh, Satomi, what kind of wife will you make?” she despairs.
Lily hasn’t been herself of late. She’s been moody and more than a bit off hand with Satomi. Satomi’s not taking her moods seriously. Lily will come around soon enough. Angelina being on alert must be as upsetting for Lily as it is for her. They’ll ride the troubles out, still be friends when everything settles down.
Since they had smiled at each other on day one of first grade, their friendship has been steady, unbreakable, she thinks. So everything that happens on a Sunday morning in Miss Ray’s after-service needlework class, as she blanket-stitches around her piece of patchwork for the wall hanging of GOD SEES ALL, comes as a shock.
Lily had talked her into joining the class in the first place, so that Miss Ray, who likes to save souls, would see that she was doing her best to bring Satomi into the fold.
“Everyone should do their bit for the church,” Lily had coaxed. “And you get grape juice and a pretzel twist, two if you’re lucky. You should really be a churchgoer, but I guess Miss Ray will let you off on account of your mother being, well, you know.”
Satomi did know, but as usual with Lily she didn’t push it. Lily didn’t mean anything by it, it was just her way. The class wasn’t so bad, it got her out of chores for a bit, and she never saw Artie on a Sunday anyway, what with his family being holy-rolling-religious.
“God and duty first,” was Mr. Goodwin’s fatherly advice to Artie. “Good Christians go to church with their people on Sundays.”
“Yeah, good boring Christians,” Artie complained. “Nothing but Bible reading and silence, it drives me nuts.”
Just before it’s time to return their needles and cottons to the pine chest marked PATCHWORK, Mr. Beck, dressed in his black Sunday-best suit, reels through the big pine door.
“Miss Ray, Miss Ray,” he repeats at full volume on his way up the aisle, letting the door bang loudly behind him.
“Careful, Mr. Beck.” Miss Ray extends her arm uselessly as he rushes toward her, knocking over the pattern stand, sending her book of patchwork pictures flying.
The class erupts in laughter as Mr. Beck cups his palm against Miss Ray’s cheek and whispers something in her ear.
A note lands on Satomi’s lap. “Pass it on,” a voice whispers.
He loves her. Pass it on, it says.
They can tell the news is big by the way Miss Ray’s eyes widen and go dark. Mr. Beck sure has the jitters about something. His body is shaking, his mouth twitching nervously, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, which flutter about like the big white butterflies that come every year at pea-cropping time. He places one of them on Miss Ray’s shoulder as though to steady her, to steady himself.
Satomi catches Lily’s eye and smiles. Lily shrugs her shoulders, looks hostile.
“Time to go home now, girls,” Miss Ray says in a high shaky voice, raising her arms in the air as though she is about to conduct an orchestra. “Be quick, now, your parents will be expecting you.”
Outside the church hall Satomi catches up with Lily.
“What do you think it’s all about, Lily?” she asks. “Mr. Beck and Miss Ray all fired up like that.”
“Well, they ain’t getting married, so I reckon we must be at war with the Japs.”
Forgetting for once that “ain’t” is common, Lily turns from her, her voice hard, dismissive.
Of course Lily is right. It can’t be anything else. Satomi swallows hard, her mouth dry, she doesn’t have enough spit and it hurts a bit. She looks down the street as though hoards of the enemy might already be on the march there.
A bunch of girls pass her, silent in their wondering, staring at her with narrowing eyes. They purse their lips, stiffen their shoulders, and start for home in huddled clusters keeping close for comfort. Mr. Beck has unnerved them. The Japs could already be nearby, in the bushes, perhaps, waiting for them on the road home.
“No need to make it a war between us,” Satomi calls to Lily’s retreating back. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She starts for home. Perhaps her mother would know what it is all about.
Lily, running to catch up with the girls who are walking her way, links arms with one of them, keeping her back straight, her head tilted as though she is sniffing the air. If the news turns out to be war, then she has the best excuse ever to dump Satomi. Artie would have to do t
he same.
From the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she never spoke to Satomi again.
Pearl Harbor
They hear the president’s speech on the radio, his voice steady above the background sounds of flashbulbs flaring:
Yesterday, December the seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of Japan.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that many American lives have been lost.
As though standing at attention, Satomi and Tamura have positioned themselves a little apart from each other. Tamura is trembling, sheet-white, her head bowed. Satomi, returned to the childhood habit she had when trying to figure things out, chews at her lower lip. She’s attempting to understand the president, to make sense of his words, but her thoughts keep returning to Aaron. She can’t stop picturing him all burned up, hurting.
Reaching out, she takes Tamura’s hand and squeezes it. Tamura dares not look at her, dares not have her own fears mirrored in her daughter’s eyes. She has stopped listening to the radio and is forming her own story in her mind. Of course Aaron is alive, wounded maybe, in a hospital perhaps, but alive. They will hear from him soon, be able to count themselves among the lucky.
The day is tepid, warm enough for the time of year, but a chill has seeped through Satomi so that she has hunched her shoulders, as though bracing herself against a bitter wind. She lets go Tamura’s hand and turns the volume up to full.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Midway Islands.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
In the moment that Aaron catches fire, Tamura is hauling bags of fertilizer onto the trailer, priding herself on how neatly she is stacking them. She has been working the fields for a couple of hours already, thinking that Aaron on Hawaiian time will still be sleeping. With luck he will be home for Christmas. He has written saying as much, although he advises against counting on it.
Once the government’s got you, you can’t count on anything. I guess even if I make it home it won’t be much of a break. I”ll need to catch up on things. Guess there’s plenty that needs catching up on. You can’t neglect the land for long before it starts paying you back.
She allows herself a moment of satisfaction. He is going to be surprised for sure when he sees how good the land is looking, despite the fact that she hasn’t gotten around to the weeds that margin the fields, some of them so pretty in their flower that she hardly thinks of them as weeds at all. He should have more faith in her.
She pictures him walking up the road to their farm, smart now in his uniform, a rare smile on his face. The image sets an alarm off in her, so that she loses the rhythm of her task for a bit. In working the land she has neglected the house. Things are not as Aaron likes them, as he will expect them to be. She determines that she will clear her head and get on with the chores she has let go.
She will wash the floors, clear the bindweed from around the kitchen door, make jams and jellies, and pickles from the bruised cucumbers. She will pound the rice for Aaron’s favorite soup. She will make sure that everything is just as he likes it. With Aaron home, life will return to normal, the awful uncertainty in her will lift. She will be her old self again.
An hour or so later, standing to stretch her back, she sees Elena Kaplan running down the field toward her as though her life depends on it.
Tamura’s spectacles aren’t so great with distances, things tend to blur, but who else can it be but Elena. Something is wrong, though, that’s for sure. Only a child hurtles at that speed for the fun of it. It’s a while before her friend’s red hair, her wide shoulders, come into focus.
“Oh, Tamura!” Elena exclaims. “It’s just so awful.”
“Awful?” Tamura scans Elena’s face, looking for the familiar signs of Hal’s brutality, but can see only fading bruises from his last beating. One must be due, she guesses, he likes to keep them regular just so she knows she can rely on them.
You don’t know, do you?” Elena says, pained at the sight of Tamura’s innocent smile. “Oh, God, you don’t know,” she moves to Tamura’s side and puts an arm around her shoulders.
Hal had relayed the news of the bombing to her, shouting it through the window as she was hoeing the soil in her vegetable plot.
“Bad news, and worse to come,” he called, beckoning her into the house. “If it wasn’t for this damn leg of mine, I’d make those sorry bastards pay.”
Elena is sick of hearing Hal go on about his polio-damaged leg. He blames his slight limp for everything that goes wrong in his life, for the bad luck that follows him, even as some sort of sick excuse for knocking the stuffing out of her whenever he feels like it.
“This is just about the last straw,” he raged. “Don’t let me catch you mixing with them down the hill anymore, you hear? From now on, you remember where your loyalties lie.”
She was scared witless of him but already planning to disobey. Disobeying him is the only thing that keeps her sane. Just the thought of the meanness in him, his big ham hands itching to lash out, makes her stomach sink, but no way is Hal Kaplan going to choose her friends for her.
Hal’s first beating had been on their wedding night, when, stinking of beer and rough with drink, he had shoved her face-down on the bed and attempted to mount her. She had pushed him away, desiring something more romantic, something more loving. She had learned her lesson that night. In Hal Kaplan’s bed he called the shots.
“I’m going to town,” he said. “Need to talk it over with the men. Don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Before the growl of his pickup had faded she was running down the field to Tamura. How could she not go to her sweet neighbor at such a time? Over the years, Tamura had shown herself to be a true friend. She remembered the comfort Tamura had given when Hal, third day into a drinking binge, had blamed her for their not conceiving a child and beaten her until her face had swollen to the size of a pumpkin. Tamura had bathed her wounds, stitching with cotton and a small-eyed needle the deep split that had exposed her jawbone. The scar is still there, neat as anything, Tamura’s tiny stitches a thin white tattoo on Elena’s brown face. Tamura Baker doesn’t judge, she just sets about making things better.
“It’s a terrible shock, Tamura. You had better sit down. Let’s go in, I will make you some tea.”
There’s a ringing in Tamura’s head as she tries to make sense of Elena’s news, a heaviness working its way from her feet, which seem too leaden to move, up to her stomach. Something painfully hot is tiding around her heart, churning things up.
“That Japan should do such a thing,” she muses, feeling oddly betrayed. “It can’t be true.”
“I’ll wait with you until Satomi comes home. She will look after you. The news has been too much for you. You need your girl.”
“There’s no need, Elena. It’s terrible news, the worst I’ve ever heard, but Aaron can’t be dead. I would know if he was. I promise you, I would know if he was.”
“Your father is not dead,” she repeats often and too brightly in the hours after the president’s broadcast. “It’s a good sign that we have heard nothing, bad news never keeps you waiting.”
Satomi thinks of Mr. Beck arriving at Miss Ray’s class with the bad news. It had certainly reached Angelina without much of a pause. And here only a day later they are at war. Perhaps her mother is right. Perhaps good news is a sluggish traveler.
She stays close to Tamura, brewing endless cups of tea, wandering aimlessly around the land with her, shaken at her mother’s seeming lack of emotion. Her own emotions r
un the gambit through fear for her father’s life to the sickening hurt at Lily’s betrayal. They don’t compare, she knows—the loss of a friend, after all, being nothing to the loss of a father—but still it eats away at her. The sight of Lily’s retreating back yesterday had something of triumph in it, some pleasure in her cruelty. How could she ever have thought Lily Morton a true friend?
She tries to fight off the hurt, but no matter how she attempts to dismiss it, the nasty feel of it won’t budge. She holds herself together, not crying, keeping her tears stored for Aaron in case it should come to that.
“She is a foolish girl,” Tamura says. “Not made for true friendship.”
As always, Satomi takes the initiative with Artie. She waits for him at the school gate, ignoring the catcalls of her fellow pupils, and gives him back his class ring before he can summon the courage to ask for it.
“You might as well have this, Artie. I’m never coming back to school, that’s for sure. And we were never going to make it anyway. Chalk and cheese.”
Artie makes a pretense of not wanting to take the ring. Not much of one, but a try, at least.
“It’s just for now,” he says sheepishly, dropping it into his shirt pocket. “You can have it back when things die down a bit.” He pats the pocket to let her know he is keeping it safe for her.
“Don’t sweat it, Artie. You and me, it was just a kid’s thing. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Maybe.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
She can tell that he is relieved that she has made it easy for him. Well, she had known all along that he didn’t have what it takes. Still, his obvious relief hurts, sets up something steely in her.
“See you around, then,” he says, turning from her. His brother has been called to the Army, and he wants to get on with the business of hating the Japs without having to pussyfoot around her. She was never going to put out anyway.