1001 Cranes (11 page)

After my hair knot is untangled and I’m deemed presentable, I get into Mrs. O’s car. Mrs. O drives pretty fast for an old person, and within a few minutes, she parks in a lot that’s large enough for a grocery store. The church building itself looks like a fancy gymnasium. I don’t see any crosses outside anywhere.

Most of the people walking into the church look Japanese, Chinese, or Korean—some kind of Asian. There are a few
hakujin
and even a couple of black people. I’m not used to being around so many Asians so many times a week. In Mill Valley, there are only a handful of us. Of course, when we go south across the bridge to San Francisco, it’s a different story. But San Francisco’s our weekend world, not our everyday world. I don’t know how I would survive in an around-the-clock Asian American world. My own family is one thing. I don’t think of them as being Japanese or Asian American. They are just Mom and Dad. Even with my grandparents and the 1001 cranes, they don’t seem that Japanese-y to me. I don’t feel that we are separate or clumped up like weeds on a nice lawn. But somehow, this church makes me feel a little like an outsider, even though on the outside I look like an insider. I don’t want to go in, but Mrs. O is there, her hand on my shoulder.

There’re a lot of kids, some really young ones who barely know how to walk. Mrs. O takes us through the building to some open double doors. A chubby man wearing a name tag smiles and hands me a yellow program.

This main room is big, with rows of purple upholstered chairs. I thought all churches had wooden pews, like the Buddhist temple a few blocks away. I want to stay in the back, but of course, Mrs. O steers me to the third row. “I’m a little hard of hearing,” she says.

There’s a band onstage—a real band, with drums, an electric guitar, and an electronic keyboard. And congas in the corner. I’m getting a little mixed up. Here are Japanese people playing congas in a Christian church.

The music starts and it kind of sounds like regular music that you might hear inside a department store. People standing in the front row, and others sprinkled here and there in the crowd, lift up their hands while they sing. It scares me a little. I’ve never seen Japanese people acting this way.

Mrs. O, thank goodness, doesn’t close her eyes or move her body. But I notice that as she clutches her program, her hands are shaking. The singing finally ends and we get to sit down for a while as we hear announcements. Then the speaker dismisses the children.

“You can go with Keila,” Mrs. O says. She has her hand on the shoulder of a slim Asian girl with big brown eyes the size of pennies. They look Asian, but the rest of her face looks kind of
hakujin,
so I know that she’s half something else. “She’ll take you to your Sunday school class.”

“Hi,” the girl says. Her voice is soft and comforting, like a favorite pillow.

“You mean I’m not staying with you?” I say to Mrs. O. I sound kind of desperate. I am desperate. I’ve never gone to a Christian church service and don’t know what they will do to me in Sunday school. Dunk me in water? Force me to lift my hands and sing? I don’t sing out loud even when I’m by myself. I’m not going to do that in front of people I don’t know.

“I can go with you and check you in—”

“It’s okay. I’ll go with her,” I say. I don’t want to do it, but at least I’m not going to be a baby and have an old lady as my chaperone.

We walk back out the double doors and I follow Keila down a hall decorated with kids’ drawings.

“So are you Mrs. Oyama’s granddaughter?” she asks me.

“No. She’s just the neighbor,” I say.

“Oh. Mrs. Oyama’s so nice. I really like her.”

Is this girl for real? I think. She has no zits, as far as I can tell, and even without makeup is beautiful. Her hair is like my mother’s, shiny and straight. Even her name is pretty. I’ll bet she has lots of brothers and sisters. And parents who are still together.

“I don’t really know her.” I try to distance myself from Mrs. O. “I’m just staying in Gardena for the summer. Then I’ll be back in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco—how neat. It’s so pretty up there. Do you live near the Golden Gate Bridge?”

That is a nerdy question, for sure, but one I can appreciate. I love the Golden Gate Bridge. I never tire of looking out the window at the persimmon orange cables and beams that hold the bridge together.

“Go over it at least four times a week,” I say.

“Wow, you’re so lucky.” Keila is one of those genuinely nice girls—not like me, with only a thin layer of sweetness on the outside. I wish that I also could be soaked through and through with good and pure thoughts. But I know it’s too late for me.

Keila takes me to a classroom at the end of the hall. I sign in and sit on a cold plastic chair with the rest of the girls. There are about nine of them and most are the cliquey, beautiful kind. One, wearing heavy eyeliner and a short cropped top, looks like the main troublemaker. Gazing into one of those free mirrors you get with a twenty-dollar makeup purchase, she adjusts her lip gloss. Five boys are running around, punching a deflated beach ball toward the ceiling. Tony wouldn’t be as immature as these guys, I think.

At this moment, I’m glad to be sitting alongside the shininess of Keila. No one can feel completely alone with her.

The teacher—I find out later that he’s called the youth pastor—walks into the room. He’s young but has a full beard. I can tell by how the other girls look at him, even the troublemaker, that they all have a crush on him. “That’s Pastor Barry,” Keila whispers, her eyes getting a bit dreamy. Ha, I think, this girl is human after all! Her crush is more grade school than junior high, though. She needs to like somebody who can be a real boyfriend, like Tony.

Pastor Barry makes me introduce myself and no one looks halfway interested except for one of the hyper guys who were throwing the limp ball against the ceiling a few moments ago. “So you’re moving here?”

“No,” I say in a loud voice that startles even me. “I’m just here for the summer, if even that.”

The boy looks disappointed, and I’m surprised. Why would anyone want me to be here, in Asianville? Can’t he tell immediately that I don’t fit in? But I take his response as a compliment. Maybe I’m not as much an outsider as I think I am.

Pastor Barry then asks the same boy, Nathan, to say some sort of prayer. Nathan looks a little embarrassed and then bows his head. The rest of them, even the troublemaker, close their eyes. I keep mine wide open—just in case. It’s like watching a magic show: some don’t want to know about the tricks, but I do.

“Dear Lord, thank you for this day. Thank you for everyone who’s here, and be with the people who can’t be here. In Jesus’s name, amen.”

Nathan opens his eyes, quickly glances at me, and then turns away.

Pastor Barry then starts telling us a story about Jesus and a woman at a well. She’s apparently living with some guy and has a string of ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands. Jesus starts asking her for some water from the well. According to Pastor Barry, Jewish men of a certain class didn’t talk to strange women during that time.

“Angela…”

As soon as I hear Pastor Barry call out my name, I know that I’m in trouble.

“What do you think about how Jesus approaches the woman at the well?”

Why are you picking on me? I think. I’m new. I shrug. “I dunno,” I say.

“You must have some thoughts.”

This Pastor Barry is pretty tricky, I think. If I say nothing, it means that I have no thoughts. That my head is empty. Well, I’m not going to fall for that. “It’s kind of weird that Jesus asks the lady for water,” I say. “Seems like he can get it himself.”

The girls in the back start to giggle. If it wasn’t for Keila, nodding seriously at my side, I would have done something very unchristian.

“Exactly. Exactly,” Pastor Barry says, and he’s not kidding. “But asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness. In fact, that’s how you build relationships.”

The room gets quiet, and I’m not following the pastor. How can asking for help be good in any way? Mom and Dad are always saying that you can’t count on anyone but yourself. Gramps says that in camp, he had to
gambaru
on his own. My family’s not into help, and come to think of it, neither am I.

As Pastor Barry goes on with his lesson, I picture Mom as that woman at the well. If Jesus came to her asking for water, she would just tell him to get it himself.

At the end of the lesson, Pastor Barry wants to pray again, but this time silently. “God knows all your problems, your struggles. Just talk with him about it.”

Everyone bows down again. Again, I keep my head up and my eyes open. Nathan’s lips move slightly and I wonder what he’s thinking, saying. What problems could he or any of them (besides the troublemaker girl) have?

I finally come up with my own prayer, or maybe it’s more of a dare. “If you’re really out there, God, then get my parents back together.” I don’t believe that it will happen, but something deep inside me wants it so badly. If this God knows everything and is all-powerful, then he will be able to do this. That is, if he really exists.

After Sunday school, Mrs. O is waiting for me outside the door.

“Bye, Angela. Maybe we can get together sometime,” Keila says to me.

“Yeah,” I say, not really thinking it will happen.

“You had a good time?” Mrs. O asks me after Keila leaves to join her parents.

“It wasn’t bad.”

Mrs. O takes me to a women’s bathroom on the far end of the building and tells me to wait outside. There’s one closer to the Sunday school classes, but I figure that Mrs. O wants her privacy.

I wait there awhile and then that boy Nathan sees me. I look away, but he heads straight for me. “The youth group is going to go out for pizza and bowling at the beginning of next month,” he says. “Maybe you want to come.” Nathan is a typical-looking Asian boy. Thin, pale face with a few pimples at his temples. His hair is pine-needle straight and shoots out at a weird angle from his hairline.

“I don’t know. I have a job, so I might be kind of busy,” I say.

“Well, if you’re not doing anything—”

“Yeah, well, I’ll think about it.”

Nathan walks away and I notice that he’s tall. Real tall. At least five feet five inches. He looks slightly uncoordinated, like his legs and arms grew too fast recently. I doubt that he could do any kind of skateboarding.

I wait about ten minutes more, and the crowd is thinning out fast. I wonder what’s going on with Mrs. O.

I finally go into the bathroom. It’s tiny, with only one stall. I don’t even have to look under the door, because I see Mrs. O lying on the linoleum floor. I get down on my knees. The floor is sticky and I try not to think about why it’s so sticky.

“Mrs. Oyama,” I say.

Her eyes are open and she tries to get up. “Help me,” she says.

I slide underneath the stall door—more stickiness—and edge beside her. There’s a little barf floating in the toilet water and a little around her lips. I wipe it away with a piece of toilet paper. The whole time, I breathe through my mouth.

Mrs. O tries to push herself up again, and I wrap my arms around her and lift her. She steadies herself against the bathroom stall and takes some deep breaths.

“Are you okay?” I ask. I know it’s a stupid question. She’s not okay. Not even close. “Maybe we better call your husband.”

“I’m all right. Maybe we should rest a little before we leave. There’s a coffeehouse here,” she says.

The coffeehouse turns out to be the church’s kitchen and a large rectangular folding table. Mrs. O orders a strawberry smoothie for me and a plain water for herself. We sit outside on a couple of folding chairs.

Most everyone seems to have left by now. It’s only the two of us on this side of the building.

“You’re probably wondering what’s going on.” Mrs. O presses her dry lips against the edge of a flimsy plastic cup. “I had breast cancer about five years ago. And it’s come back.”

I suck on my straw and look down. For some reason, my eyes start to blink so fast that I can’t see straight.

“I’ve had to go in for treatments recently. That’s why you see me getting ill.”

“You still have your hair,” I say. My third-grade teacher went through chemotherapy and lost her hair. Instead of wigs, she wore cool long scarves. She is still teaching at my elementary school, as far as I know. She taught us that when you survive cancer, it’s called remission.

“Chemo affects people in different ways. My hair just gets curlier, like I had a perm.”

“Oh,” I say. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

“Nobody knows, Angela. Well, except for Mr. Oyama. But nobody else does. Not my sons. Not my daughters-in-law.”

I just stare at her.

“I want to wait until after our anniversary party. I want people to be happy and celebrate, not afraid that I’m going to die. Maybe you’re too young to understand.”

In a way I do understand. Why have a bunch of people worried about you when you have enough to worry about yourself? I don’t know about Pastor Barry’s theory about asking for help. Mrs. Oyama is a Christian but she’s super-private as well.

I don’t say much more to Mrs. O. But I do promise that I won’t tell. Mrs. O is lucky: I’m the best secret keeper of any girl I know.