Gasa-Gasa Girl (2 page)

There was a mini kitchen in the corner, a wire dish rack holding a couple of coffee cups, a plate, and a few upside-down baby bottles. A desk by the hollow fireplace was overburdened by papers and books—it seemed almost as if it were spitting out and rejecting the weight of the information it carried. Mas turned on another lamp by the desk and peered at the books. Most were in English, but a couple were in Japanese. A Japanese-English dictionary, the fat kind that Chizuko had used when she was writing official letters, sat on a shelf. Even though Mas and Chizuko had sent their daughter to Japanese school every Saturday, Mari wouldn’t have anything to do with the language and had forgotten the little that she had learned. Chizuko was offended and sometimes hurt when the teenage Mari had hissed at her in public places: “Speak English, Mom, speak English.”

These couldn’t be Mari’s books: but then again, who else’s would they be? The son-in-law’s?

On the shelf next to the dictionary were a couple of photographs: the same one of the baby Takeo that Mari had sent to Mas, and a large one of Mari with her pale and scraggly husband, Lloyd, standing on some cement stairs leading to an official government building. Mas had not seen Lloyd for years, and that absence hadn’t done Lloyd any good. Instead of looking more refined and clean-cut, his hair was down to his shoulders and barely combed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a tan suit, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. He was a no-good gardener, just like Mas. But while Mas was a Kibei, Lloyd was a
hakujin
man, over six feet tall. He had absolutely no excuse for falling into the same line of work as desperate men.

Taped to the wall over the desk was a grainy photocopy of a man’s image. Mas adjusted his Rite Aid glasses. A Japanese man wearing a straw hat and suit. A shadow fell on half the man’s face, but he looked important.
Erai:
a big-boss type. The image was black-and-white and had obviously been taken more than half a century ago, maybe in the 1920s or 1930s, about the time Mas was born.

The disorganized books and papers on the desk didn’t make much sense: Mari had always been like Chizuko, who’d kept their home in Altadena spotless. Every kitchen knife was sharpened (that part done by Mas after much nagging from Chizuko) and arranged by size in one of the kitchen drawers. The bills were paid immediately and filed away. When she was a child, Mari herself had lined up her pencil erasers by size at the top of the pink desk Mas had built for her. A few of them were those strange white Japanese ones wrapped in colorful cardboard sleeves. At one time they smelled like sugary flowers, but now, still left on the pink desk in Mas’s silent house, they were virtually odorless.

Something else was wrong with the Park Slope apartment. Mas had taken on a new customer a few months ago, a young couple with a baby, in Pasadena. Their wood-framed house had a sloping front yard—something Mas would have never taken on in his heyday. But now competition was worse than ever and he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Every time he waited at the door to talk to the missus, he noticed the trail of blocks, overturned plastic toys, and abandoned blankets. A disaster that only a baby could create. This front room had little sign of that.

Mas went into the back room, the bedroom. Again he turned on a light, the lamp beside the bed. Sure enough, a small crib stood in the corner. A few stuffed animals and packages of disposable diapers. By the crib was a large fluorescent lamp, almost like the ones Mas had seen in orchid greenhouses. What kind of strange life was Mari leading with this giant
hakujin
gardener?

A door in the bedroom led to a small backyard outside. Through the bedroom window, Mas could see that it had started to rain. He turned the double lock and opened the door. Finally, a faint patch of green, mixed in with dirt and gray.

Mas let the drizzle wet his hair, which had been combed back with Three Flowers oil, like always. He drew up the collar of his jacket and went up the steps to the miserable garden. Its condition didn’t surprise Mas. Most gardeners were too busy with other people’s gardens to put much energy into their own. Mas’s front yard had its share of dandelions, and the backyard would have been completely grim if it had not been for Chizuko’s leftover buckets of cymbidium. As he stumbled over some icy gravel, he thought he heard the ringing of a telephone in the distance. Not my phone, he thought, going over to examine a fancy iron bench and some metal rabbits and ducks. The square of green looked like last season’s Bermuda grass.

Someone had attempted to plant a few daffodils, and they were bravely breaking through the chocolate brown soil. The plum blossoms on the garden’s sole tree were still tightly closed, awaiting the warmth of the spring sun.

Before Mas could take further inventory of the hibernating plants, he noticed a figure at the open door. The son-in-law, a skeleton of a man, his dirty blond hair hanging down his head like seaweed. His face was ashen gray. Mas shoved his hands in his coat pockets and walked back to the apartment, preparing himself for the fake niceties that relatives who were virtual strangers said to one another at holidays and funerals.

But the son-in-law didn’t even bother to smile. “Mari and Takeo aren’t here,” Lloyd said. “And I’m not sure exactly where they are.”

chapter two

The son-in-law was on the phone, sitting on the stairs that led to a wall. Mas remained seated in a beat-up easy chair in the bedroom and recalled the telephone message that Lloyd had just replayed for him in the kitchen. It was an old answering machine, the kind with a large dial for
play
and
rewind
.

“I’m not sure how I ended up here.”
Mari’s voice, which had once been as solid and defined as polished stones, now sounded limp and flimsy.
“I was taking Takeo for a walk, and before I knew it, we were on the subway, and now we’re in Manhattan. I think we’ll just stay the night over here. I’ll call you back later.”

In the other room, Lloyd had apparently gotten up from the nowhere stairs and was pacing on the hardwood floors in his work boots. He was still on the phone, perhaps with one of their friends. “She turned off her cell phone,” Lloyd was saying, “or else forgot to charge it again. I don’t know what’s going on with her.” And then in a hushed tone that Mas could still hear: “Her dad is here for the first time, for God’s sake. Why would she just take off like that?”

Mas pressed the palms of his hands against the arms of the chair. He ached for a cigarette, but hadn’t had time to stop by a grocery store.

Lloyd ended the phone call soon afterward and then stepped into the doorway of the bedroom. “Our friends in the Village are going to call as soon as they see or hear from Mari. I’m sure they’ll turn up somewhere.” Lloyd’s words were spaced out far apart from each other, as if he didn’t quite believe them.

Lloyd ran his hand through his hair, and Mas noticed that instead of a gold or silver wedding ring, he had a black and blue tattoo around his ring finger like a modern-day
yakuza
. Mas shuddered to think that Mari might have branded herself as well. “The thing I don’t get is,” Lloyd continued, “why would she pull this on the day you’re supposed to arrive?”

Mas traced the back of his dentures with his tongue. This Lloyd Jensen was an amateur. For the length of his body, it seemed that his brain should be much bigger. Obviously, Mari wanted to make sure that her father got a big dose of
bachi
, retribution, for all those times he had left the house with no word.

“Sure she come back,” Mas said.

Lloyd didn’t seem comforted by Mas’s words. “Takeo needs his light treatments. What the hell is she thinking?”

Mas stayed silent.

“You don’t know what’s been going on, do you? Not any of it.”

Mas shook his head, not knowing if he wanted to.

They went into the tiny kitchen, where Lloyd boiled water for tea and Mas sat at a small wooden table. Lloyd removed a flowered canister from the refrigerator—a cylindrical tin that reminded Mas of one that Chizuko once had. He poured loose green tea, which looked like dried grass cuttings, into a small teapot. Mas was surprised. He thought for sure the son-in-law would have thrown a couple of tea bags in boiling water.

“Jaundice,” Lloyd finally said. He put two large ceramic cups, the kind that sushi bars use, steaming with hot tea on the table.

“Huh?”

“Takeo was born jaundiced.” Lloyd sat back on a wooden chair that creaked from his weight. “His liver was unable to break down his bilirubin, so we’ve had to use an ultraviolet lamp.”

Mas couldn’t figure out what his son-in-law was telling him.

Lloyd tried again. “It’s a disorder where the skin, eye whites, are all yellow.”

Mas nodded. “Sure, Mari had that.”

“But this was a serious case. He may even need a blood transfusion.”

Blood transfusion? A little baby? Mas took a sip of the green tea. The heat burned his tongue, and he was happy for it. Mas couldn’t help but wonder if his being a
hibakusha
, an atomic bomb survivor, had anything to do with his grandson’s health problems. Two generations removed from the Bomb—could there still be a connection? Impossible, thought Mas.

“So dat why Mari call me in the first place?”

“No, it was the garden. It’s all about the garden.”

Lloyd went to the overloaded desk, shuffled some papers, and finally drew out a skinny book and a stack of photographs looped together by a rubber band. He leafed through the book and held two pages open toward Mas, who pulled down his glasses from the top of his head. It was a drawing of a curved light-blue pond surrounded by green and pink trees, most likely cherry blossoms.

In the center of the pond was an orange
torii
, a giant gate that reminded Mas of the one at Miyajima, an island not far from his family’s house in Hiroshima.

“Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” Lloyd said.

“Your garden?”

Lloyd laughed. “No, I wish. It was built a long time ago. One of the first Japanese gardens in the U.S., around 1915. It’s only about five blocks from here.”

Mas traced the outline of the pond with his left index finger, a week’s worth of dirt still left underneath his fingernail. “
Kokoro,
” he said without thinking.

“Yes, yes.” Lloyd almost dropped his tea mug. “The shape of the pond.”

“Dis
kokoro
shape famous.” At least that’s what Mas learned from a few classes attended at the gardeners’ federation in L.A.

“
Kokoro
, the Chinese character for heart, right?”

Heart? Mas didn’t put
kokoro
in the same category as heart.
Kokoro
didn’t live in the chest, but in the gut, and from there, it burned throughout one’s body. “You knowsu Japanese?”

“Never really studied in school, but I’m going to have to take at least two years’ worth for my doctorate—that is, when I can go back to school again. I’m planning to do my dissertation on Takeo Shiota, this garden’s designer. That’s his photo up there.” Lloyd pointed to the image of the Japanese man in the straw hat.

Mas couldn’t follow all of Lloyd’s words, but recognized the name. “Takeo?”

Lloyd smiled. “Yes,” he said, “like our Takeo.” He then paused and narrowed his eyes. “Damn, it’s one thing for her to have a meltdown, but why take Takeo with her?”

Mas didn’t know whether to defend Mari or add his two cents about his daughter’s mood swings. He chose instead to play it safe and keep his mouth shut.

“She doesn’t sleep well, you know,” the son-in-law continued. “Has nightmares but can’t remember any of them. She says it runs in the family.”

That it did, with both Mas and Chizuko. Chizuko would periodically wail and cry in her sleep, but wouldn’t recall anything the next morning. It was as if she exorcised all her demons from her life in Japan in the other world behind closed eyes. Lately Mas was remembering more and more of his own nightmares, which he considered more of a curse than any kind of illumination.

“Garden, youzu talk about garden.” Mas attempted to change the subject.

“Oh, the garden.” Lloyd removed the rubber band from the stack of photographs. “This is my garden.”

The first shots were of a dirt hole, a residential excavation next to an odd mansion with a pagoda-style roof above a frame like the Craftsman houses in Pasadena. In later photographs, the cement bottom of a koi pond had surfaced, and cherry blossom trees, their roots bundled in burlap, had been brought in. A pile of rocks was stacked in a corner. Where had they gotten their rocks? wondered Mas. These days even rocks were worth a premium.

“This Japanese garden had been covered over during World War Two,” Lloyd said. “It’s part of an estate that was once owned by a shipping magnate, Henry Waxley.”

Apparently Henry Waxley was one of those men who owned companies that owned more companies. Lloyd even had a book about Waxley’s life. It didn’t matter that Mas had never heard of him. Men that powerful chose to rule in the shadows—that way they could move around and make their deals without much public fanfare. By the time regular people figured out what had happened, it was too late.

To be closer to his business empire, Waxley, his wife, and their newborn daughter had left the estate to move to Manhattan in the thirties, Lloyd explained. Distant relatives moved in and bought the house, but lost the property after a particularly nasty divorce.

Happened all the time, thought Mas. He had heard about farmers losing their acreage after these family breakups.

“So new owners took over in the forties.” Lloyd took another sip of his tea. “After one of their cherry blossom trees was cut down in the middle of the night, they decided that it might be better to get rid of the entire garden, during the war at least. Too many people against anything Japanese.”

The next photo showed a tall, Asian-looking elderly man in a tasteful gray suit, the brim of a felt hat darkening the left side of his face. “This is the man who took over the house last year. My boss, Kazzy.”

“Kazzy?” That was a nickname only an American-born Nisei would own.

“Short for Kazuhiko. Kazuhiko Ouchi. They also call him K-
san
. The Waxley estate is where his parents had worked. His mother was a maid; his father, the gardener.”

Mas looked closely at the man’s face. “Don’t look Japanese.”

“He’s
hapa
.”

“
Hapa,
” Mas repeated. He was surprised that Lloyd knew the term, which meant half Japanese, half something else. There were tons of
hapa
today (Takeo, for example), but from Mas’s generation? He didn’t know of any in L.A., but then hadn’t there been laws in California against Japanese marrying
hakujin
before World War II?

“Even has blue eyes,” added Lloyd.

A blue-eyed Japanese? Mas took a second look at the man’s face. Sure enough, the right eye seemed to have a glint of silver metal in it.

“His mother was Irish. His father was from Nagano Prefecture, Japanese Alps. Kazzy was born in the Waxley House. His mother died when he was young, and then his father shortly thereafter. He was on his own at age twelve. Became a multimillionaire in textiles, mostly silk. All after the war.”

An orphan and a self-made millionaire. This type of man is different from the rest of us, Mas said to himself.

“But he’s a hard man to deal with.”

“Naturally,” said Mas. “You make it big, have to be hard.” Especially being Nisei in the 1950s, he thought, but he knew that this giant gardener probably wouldn’t understand.

“He has his own private group, the Ouchi Foundation, to fund the restoration of the garden and make the house into a museum.”

“Museum?”

“It’s going to tell about the Japanese in New York. The garden will come first, and then the museum. Kazzy handpicked me to be the director of landscaping.”

Mas almost started to laugh. Fancy title for a low-down gardener.

Lloyd must have noticed Mas’s grin on his face. “No, really. You can even ask Mari. I was working on a special project for the city in Central Park. Mari was there, bringing me lunch. And then this
hapa
man in his felt hat comes over and tells me that he’ll match my salary and more, with full medical benefits, to be his landscaping director. I checked him out, of course. His company, Ouchi Silk, is still in business, but not as big as it used to be.

“He took me out to dinner and told me about his grand plan: to document the history of Japanese Americans on the East Coast. He said that I was part of the Japanese American community, too, because I was married to Mari.”

Mas scoffed inside. Why would a
hakujin
person want to be anything other than
hakujin
?

“Mari even turned down a documentary project to help out on the fund-raising video. Waxley Enterprises and Miss Waxley, Henry’s daughter, have given a substantial amount of money, but we are filing for nonprofit status soon. Mari and I feel really strongly about this project. We’ve even pledged some money ourselves.”

So they had everything riding on this Japanese garden. Mas was a savvy enough bettor that he would have told Mari never to put your money on such a dark horse. But then he hadn’t been around to tell her and she wasn’t in a place to listen.

“I look at it as something I’m building for the future. Our future. And Takeo’s.”

Lloyd was a dreamer, his head not on practical matters. Mas pushed his top dentures hard against his gums. This was not a good sign. With the addition of Mari, there were two dreamers leading the family.

“We’re supposed to open in a couple of months, but recently there’s been vandalism.” Lloyd went through more photographs, which revealed the half-planted garden full of garbage and splattered in white paint.

“Teenagers?” Even at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles, where Chizuko was buried, somebody had knocked down some of the older tombstones, apparently a youngster’s prank.

“Probably. But the police can’t figure it out. And Kazzy hasn’t been of much help. He’s accused the whole staff; well, he’s fired three of us so far. There’s only the administrative assistant—his daughter, Becca—and myself left. Kazzy said that between the two of us we should be able to take care of the garden, which is crazy. If I could get out now, I would. But with Takeo being sick and all, we need the insurance. Times are tough; it’s not like these jobs are easy to come by.