A Girl Like You (16 page)

“She is shy, I know, but charming, don’t you think, Mother? I liked her from the first.”

“She’s too thin,” old Naomi says pragmatically. “Ill, I think.”

All the Okihiros glow with health, notwithstanding the unappetizing diet at Manzanar: canned wieners and beans and watery corn that tastes only of sugar. The women agree, though, that it is getting better. Sometimes now there is miso, and even on occasions pickled vegetables.

Eriko’s hair grows thick, her teeth are long and white, and her face has a rosy flush even when she isn’t exerting herself. Her five-foot-three frame is built so squarely that she appears to have no waist at all. She is energetic for a woman of her weight, and strong too. She can pick Tamura up without effort.

“You’re hardly an armful,” she tells her.

In comparison to Eriko’s bulk, Tamura’s slight frame appears sweetly girlish.

“She’s so pretty,” Eriko remarks to her mother.

“Hmm,” Naomi grunts, thinking that unless things improve with Tamura, her pallor will soon be a match for the mold that is inching its way up their walls.

“We are lucky to have Eriko and her family as neighbors,” Tamura says. Some would have turned their back on us.”

“Plenty did, Mama, some still do.”

Those who came to Manzanar without family, the old and the bereaved, the paralyzed, even, have to bear the indignity of sharing with strangers. One poor woman, for reasons no one can understand, was separated from her husband and billeted with strangers. Now her husband shares with six men, and she is told that nothing can be done about it.

All of them, though, had resisted being housed with the Japanese woman and her half-caste daughter. Things are bad enough without the shame of that. Just by looking at the girl you could tell she’d be trouble.

Every time it seemed likely that one or the other of them were about to be paired with the Bakers, they had stepped aside and joined another line, leaving Tamura and Satomi standing on their own. The guards got the message eventually and didn’t push it. You had to choose your battles.

“I’d share with you any day,” one of them wisecracked to Satomi. “Just let me know when you get lonely, sugar.”

“You’ve been lucky,” Haru says. “Most likely you and Tamura would have had an old woman forced on you. You would have had nothing but complaints. And if it had been an old man you would have ended up doing everything for him. And just think of it, you have a room all to yourselves.”

“I guess. Mother is a very private person, so she appreciates the space.” She is thinking of Tamura’s shame at her cough, her night cries.

“Yes, she is a fine lady,” Haru says.

“She’s a bit like you, Haru. She looks for the good in things.”

“And you look for trouble where there is none. Anyway, I was thinking of asking your mother if she would let me use your room to study. Only when you are out, of course. My grandmother thinks that I can read and talk to her at the same time. I find myself going over the same paragraph again and again.”

“Ask her. I guess she won’t mind. I’m surprised you were allowed to bring books in, though.”

“I only have a few, not enough for what I need. It bothered my mother more than the guards. She thought I should have used the space for more practical things. But if you think about it, books are more practical than dishes and bedding. Dishes and bedding can’t promise a future, can’t make you forget that you are not free.”

“Would I like your books, Haru?”

“You? Well, maybe you would, I don’t know. Did you enjoy reading at school? The classroom books, I mean.”

“I guess I did.”

“Well, it’s good to read. We won’t always be in this place. We should use the time here to make our future better, not let it slip through our hands like sand.”

“Perhaps I’ll borrow your books sometime. Okay?”

“Maybe. But are you sure you want to?”

“I do, I really do.”

“You would have to be careful with them.”

She can tell that he’s unwilling, that he doesn’t trust her with his precious books.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if you don’t want to share them.” She can’t keep the irritation from her voice. “I hear there’s to be a library here soon, anyway. You’re not the only one who wants to read, you know?”

“I know that.” His voice is full of apology. Look, I’ve just finished
This Side of Paradise
, you can borrow it if you like.

“Oh, Fitzgerald, I’ve read it,” she lies.

“Really! You’ve read the whole thing?”

He sounds just like Mr. Beck.

Taking her lead from Eriko, Tamura divides their barrack using the silk butterfly robe that Aaron had loved her to wear. She threads a stick through the arms, balancing each end on a rusty nail so that it hangs suspended, a pink quivering scarecrow.

“Oh, Tamura,” Eriko enthuses. “It’s beautiful, not real silk, of course, but beautiful just the same.”

Tamura looks at the garment with disbelief—it is a design from ancient times, a piece of history that surely belonged to a different woman than the one she is now. What had induced her to pack such a thing? At the sight of its brilliance in dusty Manzanar, her thoughts turn to images of geishas, of obedience, of Aaron. Why had she allowed him to keep her in the last century? Why had she attempted to fix Satomi there with her?

“I would never wear such a thing here!” she exclaims to Satomi. “It would look ridiculous. I will never wear it again. You need some privacy, I can’t think of a better use for it.”

Fingering the robe, Satomi has to swallow hard to keep the tears at bay. Her saliva seems to have dried to sand. The silly, pretty thing is the very trinity of Aaron, Tamura, and her childhood self.

It isn’t much privacy, a roughly hung gown that moves in the drafts as though alive, but she is grateful for it. She rests behind it stretched out on her iron cot, one of Haru’s books in hand, imagining him doing the same on the other side of the thin divide between them. Her hand goes to the wall, where she holds it as
though she can feel his warmth heating her palm. Sometimes late into the night she hears him turning the pages of his book, sighing.

Behind her pink screen she can deal discreetly with her monthly bleeds, while on the other side of it, Tamura, hawking up the muck from her lungs, indulges the idea of privacy too.

Tamura has quickly let go the expectations she had of Manzanar, and has settled to making the best of it. Satomi, though, along with half of the camp, is on alert, waiting. Waiting for news that their confinement has been a mistake, waiting to hear that the war has ended, waiting perhaps for something more terrible. Wherever people gather at Manzanar, hope and fear are the text of their chatter.

“Have you heard anything?”

“There seem to be more guards, don’t you think?”

“Did I imagine a shot in the night?”

The slightest change in routine takes on meaning, unsettles everyone. And the rumors, like the dust storms, appear to arrive out of nowhere.

“We are all to be shot.”

“I heard only the men.”

“A guard told me we are to be shipped to Japan.”

Being sent to Japan, for the Nisei generation, seems almost as bad as being shot. They are native-born Americans, after all, pumped with the notion of sadistic yellow bastards and murdering Japs. Why would they fare better in Japan? Japanese-Americans are a different breed than their ancestors. They are democrats, modern citizens, proud of the American way.

But some of the young men have begun to challenge this view. They call themselves the “Kibei” and welcome the idea of returning to Japan. It’s their homeland, they tell each other, the land of their fathers, after all, they would not be imprisoned there. They
go around in gangs, not listening to their elders, causing everyone problems. They challenge the guards by hanging around the fencing, and running through the alleys at night, calling out wildly to each other.

“They are nothing but trouble,” Haru says. “They make things worse for everyone.

“At least they have spirit,” Satomi argues. “You have to give them that.”

“Ha, spirit, is that what you call it? Their spirit tars us all with the traitor’s brush.”

To help counteract their influence and show his loyalty to America, Haru has joined the American Citizens League. League members have asked to join the American forces. Haru, for one, can’t wait to fight for his country, to go to war in its name.

But even his loyalty is challenged when a hundred and one orphans are rounded up and brought to Manzanar. The all-to-be-shot rumors gain momentum for a while. Why else would they imprison babies, what harm are they capable of?

Manzanar’s director, Mr. Merrit, has been ordered by the Army’s evacuation architect, Colonel Bendetsen, to confine the children to the camp.

Bendetsen has ignored the frantic pleas of the adopted families and the Catholic missions who have been caring for them to let the children remain in their care.

“They are our family.”

“Only children, after all.”

“How can it harm, for them to stay with us?”

Deaf to their pleas, he insists against reason that the children might be a threat to national security.

Some come to Manzanar from the white families who adopted them, grieving a second time at the loss of yet another set of parents. There are babies as young as six months old, the children, it’s
said, of schoolgirl-mothers from the other camps; there are toddlers taking their first precarious steps, and confused six-year-olds.

The babies, sensing change, cry for attention. The older ones gather together in silence, frightened at the deep pitch of the guards’ voices, the dull metal gleam of their guns.

Manzanar’s inmates are disturbed by the sight of the children. Seeing such innocence lined up feeds the sense they have that the madness has no limits.

“Why else would they be taken out of white homes, if not to kill us all?” they say.

“This must be the big, the final, roundup.”

Racially the children are a mixed bunch, some with as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry. The blond ones stand out among their fellows, reminders that even the tiniest trace of Japanese blood, no matter how far back in your family, condemns you. Watching those little souls arrive, it’s hard for Satomi too not to feel so hated that genocide seems unlikely.

“How can those kids possibly be a threat to anybody?” she fumes, while Haru despairs. He wants to keep faith with his country, but at the sound of the children singing “God Bless America” he has to agree with Satomi that it makes no sense.

As the children settle into the Children’s Village, the three large tar-papered barracks hastily erected to house them, fears of mass murder recede and other rumors get a look in. Hope floats around the one that says they are to be allowed home. But after a while hope itself makes them feel foolish. The more you hope for home, the farther away it seems to get.

Resignation is taking over so that even the horror stories of rats in the babies’ cots fail to impress. Rats are no strangers in Manzanar, they have outnumbered the human residents from day one. In the company of cockroaches the ubiquitous creatures scuttle under the barracks, run across the beds at night. They have to be
chased from the dripping water spigots, pulled each morning from the glue traps set on the many mess hall floors.

“Check my bed for me, pleeease,” Satomi begs Haru every evening.

“They won’t be there now,” he says. “They come when it’s dark, when you are sleeping.” His voice takes on a ghostly moan. He likes to hear her squeal.

The scraps of good news that come, however small, are welcome and made much of. A post office is to be set up, an occasional movie is to be allowed, and there is an extra sugar ration on its way.

The bad news, though, is always major, always dramatic. Tamura and Eriko fly into a panic when they hear that a congressman, noting the high birth rate in the camps, has proposed that all Japanese women of child-bearing age should be sterilized.

“It would ruin our girls’ lives.” Tamura can’t stop the tears.

“He must be a wicked man,” Eriko wails, her arms tight around the squirming Yumi, who has only just started menstruating.

“No one’s taking him seriously,” John Harper, the popular camp doctor, says to Ralph and Satomi as they sit on the ground outside his office. “Congress is not completely mad.”

“They’ll have to shoot me before they try, the bastards,” Satomi says, and Dr. Harper, not for the first time, is shocked at her language, impressed by her passion. Since they first met when she came to him with a splinter in her hand that had festered, he has felt a connection with her.

“This will hurt,” he had warned. “I’m going to have to dig a bit.”

He had laughed when she had cursed at the pain.

“Damn!”

“Never heard a Japanese female swear before,” he said.

Since that time, she and Dr. Harper have shared what Haru
thinks of as an unsuitable friendship. Along with Ralph, they debate politics, discuss how the war is going, have conversations that sometimes turn argumentative. They agree that America will win the war and wonder together what life will be like when it is over.

Despite that he represents authority, it is hard, Satomi thinks, not to like Dr. Harper. There’s no doubt that he is a good man. He may be ungainly, always dropping things, losing his papers, searching for his spectacles, but none of that counts for anything. Dr. Harper is a man filled with goodness and grace.

“There’s a glow in him, don’t you think?” she says to Ralph.

“Yes, that’s it exactly, Satomi. He’s the hail-fellow-well-met sort.”

Now and then, breaking the camp’s rules with pleasure in his heart, Dr. Harper gives Satomi his old newspapers. It staves his guilt for a while, and what harm can it do? He never, before Manzanar, thought of himself as a rule breaker, but stupid rules don’t deserve to be followed. Rules that say people must be kept in the dark, no papers, no radio, stay ignorant, beg to be broken.

“If you won’t go to school, then it’s time you went to work,” Haru insists. You should stop bothering the doctor, Satomi.”