A Girl Like You (11 page)

“You didn’t come. You knew my mother was ill and you didn’t come.” She faces him with a racing heart.

“Listen, girl, ’bout time you knew your place,” he snarls. “Strutting around our town as if you own it. If you want a doctor, get a Japanese one.”

“There isn’t a Japanese doctor in Angelina, you should know that, Dr. Wood.”

“Nothing much I can do about that.”

“No, but you took an oath, didn’t you, a promise to care for the sick?”

“I don’t have to answer to you, girl. Best thing you can do is to get yourself home, learn some manners.”

“You broke your word, Dr. Wood. My mother has never broken a promise in her life. Doesn’t make you much of a doctor, does it?”

She walks home, hardly noticing the slanting drizzle that soaks through her jacket, and slicks her hair to the color of her mother’s. Stopping at the roadside to wretch up a thin colorless bile, she thinks that it is one fight after another, will she ever get used to it? Maybe Mr. Beck had been right, maybe she and Tamura should leave Angelina. It feels to her as though it has already let them go anyway.

Next morning at dawn she takes the feed to the chickens and finds a bag of groceries propped against the wire of their run. Two bags of rice, a small sack of flour, two lemons, and a paper twist of tea.

I’ll fetch more when I can
, is faintly written in pencil on the bag.

Elena had come in the night as Hal slept. Satomi sits on the ground and howls.

“I’m sorry to have missed Christmas,” Tamura says. “I know that you like it.”

“I don’t care about it, Mama. I never have, you know that.”

It isn’t true; despite Aaron’s scoffing, Christmas has always seemed to her a magical time. Lily used to give her a little gift of candy and a homemade card, and Mr. Beck buys the class a big bag of peanuts in their shells to share. The general store dresses its window with cotton wool snow, and sets a SEASON’S GREETINGS sign fringed with tinsel above its door. She thinks it enchanting.

“When I was a girl,” Tamura says, “even though we weren’t Christians, I always loved the lights they put up along Nuuana Avenue. Do you think they have put them up this year, despite everything?”

“We could go and see. We could visit Father’s grave and maybe even see your mother too. We have money in the bank. Let’s use it, Mother. Let’s go.”

“No, that would not be right. I will never return to Hawaii. Your father would not like me to break our agreement. I don’t need a grave to find him. He is in the fields, in the candlelight, and in you. In any case I couldn’t bear to see his name there among the dead.”

“I know, I know. I understand,” Satomi says, although she doesn’t. Why would her mother not wish to visit her husband’s grave? Why would she not wish to break the cycle of their confinement?

“Should I get the Buddhist priest to visit you, Mother? I’m sure that he will come if we ask, and it might help you.”

Tamura shakes her head. “I do not know him, Satomi. In any case, I have no religion left in me, it would be pointless.”

The Roundup

Three months after Aaron’s death, the order to vacate their home is delivered to them by Mr. Stedall, the man they now can’t help but associate with bad news.

“It’s not my doing,” he says, his forehead creased in concern. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

“What is it now, Mr. Stedall?” Satomi asks.

“It’s not good, not good at all, I’m afraid.”

“When was it ever?”

“November ’41, I guess.”

The notice of
Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien
, is issued by something called the Civil Control Administration.

“Never heard of it, myself,” Mr. Stedall says.

He has brought the leaflet on his own initiative, knowing that the Baker women don’t go to town these days, where the notices are tacked on poles and shop fronts and are hard to miss. Better they should know and have time to prepare. Mrs. Baker has suffered enough shock for one small woman, surely.

They have four days to quit their home, four days to leave their farm and their lives. No wonder Mr. Stedall feels bad at being the bearer of such news. No wonder he rocks on his bicycle as he peddles away from them.

Along with their Japanese neighbors, they are to be sent to a detention camp and must present themselves on the due day at the Angelina assembly area, which turns out to be the hastily renamed bus station, out by the peach-canning factory on the road heading west.

By Executive Order 9066, Franklin Roosevelt demands that all those of Japanese ancestry, those with any Japanese blood at all, are to be excluded from the entire Pacific coast. That means all of California and most of Oregon and Washington too. It means the Japanese residents of Angelina, and it means Tamura and Satomi.

Satomi reads the notice to Tamura, the paper trembling in her hand so that the writing blurs and she has to keep starting over. Tamura sits upright and very still in her chair, the formality of the phrasing confusing her. Surely it can’t be true; Satomi has put the emphasis in the wrong place, or she herself has misheard. What is a
non-alien
other than an American citizen?

“Are you sure it says that? Can it be possible that it says that?”

“It does say that, but I’ll read it again slowly, to be certain.”

When she has finished, Tamura rises from her chair and says quietly, “Yes, that is what it says, then.”

“How can this man remove us from our home, Mother? Surely he doesn’t have the right, it’s un-American.”

“He is the president of the United States. We are nothing to him.”

“Father voted for him didn’t he? He must have trusted him.”

The shocking news seems too much to be absorbed in one go, but the awful certainty that there is no way out brings them to the edge of hysteria. Something hideous is about to happen to them, something without reason, a horrible thing that they are powerless to stop.

The questions come, each one prompting another that has no answer.

“Where will they send us?”

“What will they do with us?”

“How will we live?”

“What will happen to the farm?”

“We must stay together, whatever happens,” Satomi says. “We mustn’t let them separate us.”

“No, we must not be separated,” Tamura repeats, while harboring an unspoken terror that even their lives might be in danger.

In the raw panic that overtakes them, tending the crop seems pointless; even cooking is beyond them. They walk about in circles, the shock the news has brought dragging at their insides. Satomi, as though watching through others’ eyes, sees their pacing as spinning, it’s the nearest thing to spinning, she thinks. By dusk they are tired out. Sliding into static mode, they wait as though on alert for the ice to crack, the sea to swallow them up.

Sleep is out of the question. Satomi takes herself to her mother’s bed, where they talk and hold each other until dawn breaks and they feel the need for coffee.

“How will we make coffee at this ‘detention center’?” Tamura asks.

“I don’t know, Mama, I don’t know the answer to anything. Maybe they will make coffee for us.”

She watches Tamura walk the tidy house, watches her touch every bit of furniture as though taking leave of old friends. She watches her stroke the curtains, and lock the linen box, and take down the china from the big pine dresser that Aaron had made for her.

Seeing her mother’s pain, she determines never to love too much the place she lives in, never to allow any building to hold part of her in its fabric. Yet under the eviction threat she can’t help feeling a new love for the place herself.

After a couple of days the fog in her head clears and memories come flooding as she paces around their property. Memories of Artie kissing her at the side of the log shack, putting his tongue in her mouth so that she could taste the lemonade he had been drinking, sweet and sour at the same time. She recalls his voice as clearly, as though he is standing next to her saying it over again: “Don’t be a tease. Nobody likes a tease.”

In the packing shed she stands in a shaft of light remembering a day when through her fingers she had watched, with dread in her heart, her father tenderly, one by one, drown five perfect little kittens that had been born in the dark behind the box stack.

“Two cats are all the farm needs,” he had said, as though speaking of spades or pitchforks. Her father’s certainty seems like something wonderful now, something safe and protecting.

And how old had she been that long hot summer when she had spied on her parents? Thirteen, she’d been thirteen, and all grown up, she had thought then. The memory of the girlish arc of her mother’s back, her father’s rough work hands, the glowing room, is still crystal clear. Tamura had been happy then. Would she ever be again?

It comes to her that wherever life is to take her, the Baker place is the only home she has ever known, and that all her memories of her childhood on the farm will come now with a serving of pain. Order 9066 will in her future mark her past, and make it hard for her to call herself an American.

They shakily go over the list of orders that came with the notice. They are to take with them only those possessions that they can carry themselves. They should include enamel plates, eating utensils, and some bedding. They are not to pack food or cameras. Radios are forbidden, as is alcohol. They must report at ten A.M. They must be on time.

Tamura begins packing the one small suitcase they own, while Satomi uses the old duffel bag that usually hangs behind the kitchen door, housing potatoes.

Apart from a few clothes and the Indian blanket from her bed, there is nothing much Satomi wants to take, so Tamura fills the rest of the duffel with things that remind her of Aaron. Mania possesses her as she packs his clothes and shoes, a bar of his shaving soap, an old tobacco pouch. She is not to be dissuaded.

“I need to breathe him in, I want to breathe him in,” she says, weeping. “And what will happen to them if I don’t?”

“What will happen to everything here? Just take your own things, Mama, just the stuff you will need.”

Sick at heart, she watches as Tamura fills the bag, hiding their last small sack of rice in the bottom. The sight of it fills her with shame. They are refugees now, to be herded to God knows where in their own country.

Elena comes sneaking across the field, hugging the woods’ perimeter so as not to be seen by her husband.

“I’ve heard they may search your place,” she says. “You should burn anything incriminating. Things will be bad enough for you, no need to bring extra trouble to your door.”

“We have nothing incriminating, Elena. What could we have?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Tamura. Anything that could tie you to Japan, I suppose. Photographs, that sort of thing.”

“Photographs? Oh, yes, photographs,” Tamura says, confused.

She takes Elena’s hand, her eyes stinging with tears. “You are a good friend,” she says. “We will not forget you.”

“Life’s hard enough on the land.” Elena is weeping too. “You’d think they could leave us in peace to get on with it. You don’t deserve this, Tamura. Look after your mother, Sati.”

They watch her until she is halfway up the field, watch her dart in and out of the trees, skimming the margin between field and
wood. They watch her go, willing her on. If Hal catches her, this time they won’t be around to see bruises.

Tamura goes to the yard and starts a little fire with sticks and grass. She takes the book of Japanese fairy tales that Satomi had loved as a child, the photograph of her mother standing outside her father’s shop that she had kept hidden from Aaron, and lets the flames eat them.

“They would prefer us to burn ourselves, I suppose,” she says.

The day before they are due to leave, they summon up the courage to go to the bank to withdraw the money from the farm account, only to find that it has been frozen. The clerk, polite but juiced up with the power to say no, says that it is the same for all the Japanese.

“Rules are rules, Mrs. Baker, but you needn’t worry none. I guess it will only be a temporary measure.”

“Ha! And whose rules are they?” Satomi sneers.

“Government rules, Mrs. Baker,” he says, ignoring Satomi. “We all have to obey the government.”

When they are back in the truck, numb with shock, a weary resignation overtakes them. It is becoming a habit to accept. Even so, Tamura is too upset to drive safely. She tries, but her steering is erratic, so that she veers toward the middle of the road, alarming the oncoming traffic.

“We need gas, Satomi.” Her voice is thin, shaky, she’s on the verge of tears. “Just enough to get us home, no point in getting too much. I’ll pull in and you can drive back. Who cares if we break the rules now?”

At the gas station, the JAP TRADE NOT WANTED sign brings Satomi back to herself with a jolt.

“We have always bought our gas here,” Tamura says, shaking her head in disbelief. “I remember when they started up and were glad of our business. How can they do this to us now?”

“Because they are idiots, Mother. Small-brained idiots, that’s why.”

“Let’s go, Satomi, it doesn’t matter. We’re the same people; it’s them who have changed.”

“It does matter, and they should know it.”

Tamura parks up by the pump with a sinking heart. Satomi holds her hand on the horn, rousing the chained dog to barking.

“We ain’t serving gas to Japs no more,” the red-faced youth she knows from school tells her. “You’d best try elsewhere.”

“Who are you to tell me that, Kenny Buchan?” she shouts, getting out of the truck, walking around it to face him. She’s so fired up it’s an effort not to hit him. Tamura slides over to the passenger side, calling to her to let it go.

“My father died defending this country, defending you.” Satomi pokes him in the chest so that he staggers a bit. “You weren’t worth it.”

The boy shrugs, takes a step backward. He knows Satomi Baker isn’t above landing a punch, but you can’t hit girls, not even Jap ones, not even the ones who hit you.

“Don’t make no difference what you say, we don’t serve gas to Japs.” He is on his guard, just waiting for her to make a move.