1001 Cranes (2 page)

I lean against my duffel bag, a giant formless stuffed animal, and stare out the window. There’s nothing along the highway. Stretches of brown grass and dirt, like the underside of an old carpet that has been stripped from the floor. I can see rows of electrical transmission towers. Some look like metal outlines of cats on stilts or centipedes on their hind legs.

My mother drives slowly, so dusty cars pass us by, one by one. Some have only one person—the driver—but others are filled with families, bare feet, and mussed-up hair. Sleeping bags and bicycles are tied to the tops or the sides of vans. I wonder what it would be like in a car full of human noise. To feel the hot and stinky breath of the person next to you, to feel bare knees knocking against yours, elbows poking into your side, stickiness from either sweat or spilled soft drinks on the backs of your thighs. I doze off to Sly Stone’s screaming, and then wake up to the worst smell filling my nostrils. We speed by a sign:
KETTLEMAN CITY
.

The windows of the car are all dusty and smeared with the brown and green guts of flying insects. But I can still make out the acres of white-and-black-splattered cows tightly crowded in mud.

Fumes of crap begin to rise in the Toyota.

“Mom, the vent, the vent.”

My mother lowers the stereo volume and flips the vents closed. “Poor cows,” she mutters.

I pinch my nose and take short breaths through my mouth.

“These animals are tough, Angela,” my mother says, turning a knob to squirt soapy water onto the dirty windshield. “They can stand in their own crap.”

All I can think is that at least they aren’t alone.

Sick Sadako

You know that Los Angeles is within striking distance when you reach the Grapevine. I have no idea why they call it the Grapevine. There are no vines of grapes, just boulders and hills and a special turnoff for trucks that can’t handle the steep slopes. But my mother and I are going down the Grapevine, not up, which means the car isn’t going to shudder or tremble as it often does on extreme inclines. We don’t have to worry about overheating; we just have to make sure that we stay clear of any jackknifing trucks in the neighboring lane.

We clear a hill and then I see a few skyscrapers poking their heads out of some brown soup. Not quite the Emerald City. More like the rust city.

“We’re going in there….”

“It’s not that bad. There’s smog in northern Cal, too. Haven’t you noticed it around San Jose?” my mother says.

It’s going to take more than that for me to be sold on smog.

“Listen, I lived in smog for eighteen years. It didn’t hurt me.” She goes on to talk about the regular smog alerts they had in Gardena. The school alarm would go off and no one was allowed to go outside for recess. Instead of dodgeball, they played seven up, in which they put their heads down and stuck up their thumbs. Each of seven secret chosen ones would touch the thumb of someone whose head was down, and the thumbs would then disappear into fists. Then they all lifted their heads, and those with thumbs down guessed who had touched them.

She is talking again about the seventies, when all the Japanese girls used tape to create double eyelids, and feathered back their hair to look like Farrah Fawcett of
Charlie’s Angels.
I have a feeling that this Scotch tape eyelid technique worked on my mother but not on my aunt Janet.

“Dad says smog smells bad.” I remember exactly how he described it: tinny, like car exhaust mixed with nail polish. “He says that it also feels heavy. Like a rock on top of your chest.”

“Dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s not from L.A.” My mother’s voice sounds hollow, like a thick ceramic plate spinning on a linoleum floor. You’re afraid the fallen plate is going to break, but it stays whole and empty at the same time.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be away all summer,” I tell Mom. I’m worried about what will happen while I’m gone.

“What are you talking about? Grandma and Gramps are expecting you. Janet and Grandma need your help. And you said you would go.”

But that was before Mom started going to the counseling sessions alone, before Dad rented some apartment. My leaving was supposed to get them back together.

“So what’s the big deal about this one-thousand-and-one-cranes stuff, anyway?” I ask.

“You saw the displays last New Year’s, didn’t you?”

All I can remember are the fancy black frames. I didn’t spend too much time looking inside them. I was too busy stuffing my face with
an,
I guess.

“Well, they’ve since turned that back storage room they have into a one-thousand-and-one-cranes workroom.”

“That many people want those things? What are they for, anyway? Good luck or something?”

“You know that book we used to read together—
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
?”

“Yeah, what about it?” I remember the story of Sadako, a young girl who suffered from radiation sickness caused by the atomic bomb. She started folding cranes and pretty soon everyone was making cranes so that she’d get better. As these things go, she just got worse and eventually died.

“Well, the Japanese fold a thousand cranes for people to get better from sickness. I guess here in the States, the extra one is for good luck for weddings and anniversaries.”

“You mean they don’t even do this stuff in Japan?”

Mom shakes her head. “Not for weddings. I think it actually started in Hawaii.”

“You and Dad didn’t have a display, did you?” I try to remember the old photographs of their hippie wedding.

Mom takes a deep breath and I see her narrow shoulders tighten. “You know we’re not into all that kind of stuff.”

I sink back into my duffel bag. So Mom and Dad don’t even believe in the displays. But they are going to force me to make them to earn my keep this summer. As we wind down the Grapevine, I picture myself hunched over a table, my fingers bleeding from 1001 paper cuts.

Closed-mouth
Kokeshi

Even though I’ve been to visit Gramps and Grandma twelve times, I never really paid attention to the house they lived in. Before, our visits would last, at the longest, a weekend. But I’m going to be there the whole summer. By myself.

So as my mother turns onto their street and parks the car in front of the house, I take a long, deep look. The paint is faded yellow, like sunshine that has just about quit. The house has a square cement porch with stairs and a peeling white wooden lattice on one side. The lawn is not the kind that tickles and soothes bare feet. Instead, it reminds me of the plastic grass at the miniature golf course near my other grandparents’ house. The long driveway is cracked, with bits of stray gravel here and there.

I can’t believe that my mother lived in such an ugly place.

“Angela, c’mon. Bring your stuff in.” Mom holds open the back door, and I get out, dragging the duffel bag with me. The air is surprisingly cool and I even smell a tinge of salt.

Mom leaps over the two front stairs and raps on the screen door. No one answers, and I feel my head start to ache. I don’t want to be here. I want to be with my dad, sitting on our deck, the sun shining through the trees onto our backs.

“Hmmm, I told them we’d be here around three o’clock.” Mom tries to look through the windows, but heavy ivory drapes hide all evidence of what is inside. Finally, we hear the lock unlatch, and the door opens. Aunt Janet. “Oh, hello.” Janet is rounder than I remembered, and through her white T-shirt and peasant skirt I can see that her belly is squishy and soft.

“Where is everybody?” Mom never bothers to say “hi” or “goodbye” to Aunt Janet, I’ve noticed.

“At the shop. We have a wedding tonight. I just dropped off the crane display.”

My mother glances down at her watch. “I’ve got to go to the bank before it closes. Angela, you stay with Aunt Janet.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you stay. It’ll be better. You must be tired, anyway.”

“I’m not that tired,” I lie.

“No, Angela, you’re staying here.”

From the tone of her voice, I know that my mother is going to do something she doesn’t want me to see. Something I’m sure involves my dad.

“Maybe I’ll go skateboarding.” I know that idea isn’t going to fly with Mom.

“You will not. You will stay inside the house with Aunt Janet.” Mom presses her fingers into the flesh of my upper arm and it hurts. I drop my duffel bag. She then pushes me through the front door. I bump into Aunt Janet, who almost falls backward, causing her gold-rimmed granny glasses to lie lopsided on her face. “Janet will show you where you’re staying, so you can settle in.”

I feel the whole top half of my face grow hot. My nose becomes runny, as if I have just swallowed a big dollop of wasabi.

Mom goes back to the porch to retrieve my duffel bag and drops it just inside the door. “I’ll be back,” she says. “It’ll only take an hour or so.” She then looks at me as if to say “sorry,” but I keep my head down.

I rub the spot where she grabbed me, my arm outstretched as if I’ve just given blood. I stay in that awkward position for a few minutes, until I hear the door of the car open and shut and the engine turn on. Meanwhile, Janet fixes her glasses so that they lie exactly perpendicular to her knot of a nose. She closes the door, bends down to pick up the duffel bag, and places the bag by the sofa.

I stare at two Japanese masks hanging beside the door. One, a hideous demon face with horns and a menacing grin, is made out of wood. The eyes are lifelike; the mask’s creator even carved out the dark of his pupils. Next to the demon is the white face of a woman, her skin the color of the ashy end of a cigarette. She smiles sweetly and her eyes slope down like two commas on their sides. I don’t know which mask is spookier; even though the woman is smiling, she’s probably not smiling on the inside.

“You must be thirsty. How about some Coke?” Aunt Janet gestures toward a television inside a fake-wood console in the living room. “You can watch TV. Or play solitaire on the computer.”

I shake my head.

“You’ll be in your mom’s old room, but we haven’t had time to clean it just yet. Tonight you and your mom will have to stay in the living room on the couch. I hope that’s okay. It’ll be like a slumber party.”

Yeah, I think. The last person I want sleeping next to me is my mother.

“Sit down. Sit down, Angie. Please.”

I stay by the door for a moment, just to spite her. But there is something about her lumpy figure that softens my hard edges.

I go into the living room and sit on the couch. The living room is the opposite of our tidy one up north. The Inui house isn’t dirty, but overfilled, like a small man who has eaten too much. At any time, the room could belch or vomit its contents, like an active volcano.

Grandma Michi and Gramps don’t like to think in ones. They think instead in twos, fours, and sixes. There isn’t only one rooster knickknack marking Gramps’s birth in the year of the rooster, but four of them in different sizes and made of different materials, next to a black grizzly bear statue with a clock in its middle; six dancing Japanese dolls; and at least eight
kokeshi
dolls, the skinny wooden ones with no arms or legs. What freaks me out about those—as well as Hello Kitty—is that they have no mouths. They can’t eat or smile or talk.

On each side of the fireplace are four built-in white brick cubbyholes stuffed with household items—plastic soda holders, wooden boards that were attached to bright pink fish cakes called
kamaboko,
toilet paper cardboard rolls. Why does Grandma Michi hold on to junk? It makes me feel anxious and sad at the same time.

“Coke?” Aunt Janet brings a glass of soda with ice cubes and places it on a crocheted coaster on the coffee table. The table is already stained with countless circles, so I don’t know what good the coaster is.

I take a sip and feel the fizz go up my nose. I wish I could spend all afternoon inhaling, feeling bubbles and not much else. But carbonation doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t last forever.

On the wall across from the couch are about a dozen framed photographs of the family. The only black-and-white one is of Gramps and Grandma’s wedding. Gramps was so handsome then, his jet-black hair oiled and combed back. The line of his nose reminds me of the marking of an extra-sharp pencil. He looked like he could have been a scientist. Grandma, on the other hand, had a bigger build than she does now; you can even see it through her white satin dress. She had broad shoulders, like a football player, as well as a broad face. She reminds me of a bear, not a scary grizzly or a soft stuffed teddy bear, but something in between. There was a deep wrinkle at the top of her nose, a secret zipper; if you tugged at it, ghouls and ghosts would tumble out, telling stories of what it was like to be held captive in Grandma Michi’s head.