Gasa-Gasa Girl (28 page)

Mas shook his head. Anna’s country had been pulled apart by different world powers. The only reason her family probably had turned to one was to get away from the other.

“I threatened to tell K-
san
if she kept up the relationship. She refused to break it off, almost spit in my face. Before I could do anything more, K-
san
ended it. I was so happy at first. But then his mood became so dark. He must have known that he was dying then. I’m sure that’s why he decided to call it quits with Anna. He didn’t want her to feel that she had to hang around while his body wasted away.” Becca hid her face in her hands. “He must have really loved her.” She lowered her hands, black makeup smudges like ash around her eyes. “Do you think K-
san
would have forgiven me?”

Mas didn’t answer. He didn’t know Kazzy Ouchi, or even much about forgiveness. He did understand emptiness and regret, however. Having those feelings in common, they stood silently at the open gap of the pond, imagining what it would be like for it to be finally filled with clear water and brightly colored fish.

A
fter the police told them that they could go, Mas told Mari that he needed to make one more stop, one more task he needed to do, before returning to the underground apartment.

“I have
yoji
,” he said.

“Want me to come with you?”

Mas shook his head. “But there’s sumptin’ you and Lloyd needsu to do. Your own
yoji
. Tell Lloyd to give Ghigo
okome
can.”

“Our rice container?”

“Let Lloyd handle,” Mas said. His daughter had gone through enough for that day.

M
as returned to the same Parisian flower shop, and indeed the same girl was working behind the counter.

“Hel-lo,” the girl said very deliberately, and Mas figured out that she still thought he was an inspector from Japan.

“I needsu gardenia.”

“You want to send some gardenias?”

Mas nodded. “One dozen,” he said, taking out his credit card. “To Fort Lee.”

F
or the next couple of days, Mas really tried to take it easy. Both Lloyd and Takeo were discharged from the hospital, so the whole family was again in the underground apartment. Mas, however, couldn’t help but be
gasa-gasa
. He first began cleaning the moldy bathtub with an old toothbrush and then tried to do something with Lloyd and Mari’s pitiful garden. Finally, Mari moaned. “Dad, you’re so restless; you’re driving us crazy. Get out of the house, why don’t you? You’re going home in a couple of days. Go sightseeing with Tug.”

Mas was not wild about sightseeing, because what was the point? He usually wanted to get from point A to point B with the least wandering. Straight lines were the best, the shortest distance between two locations.

But Tug was a lot like Chizuko. They liked to see things beyond the most direct route. To heed his daughter’s plea, Mas agreed to wander this time. “You have to see the Statue of Liberty,” Tug said. “Up close.”

As they approached the landmark on the ferry, Mas first noticed that the statue seemed squatter in real life. He thought that the green lady’s figure would take his breath away, overwhelm him with her sheer size and grandeur. Instead, she seemed more comforting, like a distant female relative who regularly sent you treats in the mail. But the color—the greenish tinge much like the rusty copper end of an old hose—that was another story altogether. That was indeed incredible.

Upon reaching the small island, they debarked from the ferry and stood at the foot of Lady Liberty. Dodging the lenses of cameras aimed by Chinese and European tourists, Mas couldn’t really take in much of the statue, aside from the folds of her skirts. Tug explained that they could take an elevator to climb three hundred fifty-four stairs to the statue’s crown, but again, Mas thought, what was the point? Then Tug took him to the edge of the water so that they faced the skyline of Manhattan.

Tug told him about all sorts of Nisei who had made it—men and women who constructed skyscrapers, built sculptures, created paintings, and established trading empires.

The Nisei who flew away from the Pacific Coast were indeed a different species. They could stretch their wings without fear of being clipped or captured. Even Takeo Shiota, an Issei, had made a name for himself. But then Mas remembered how Lloyd had told him that Shiota had been left to die in an internment camp. Why? thought Mas. Why would a gardener who placed a giant orange gate in a pool of water be a threat to anyone?

Mas remained quiet on the ferry ride back to Manhattan. The wind whipped through his hair, causing the sides to stick straight up like the ears of an aging bat.

“There’s one other place I want to show you,” said Tug.

Mas’s legs were so
darui
, weak, that he thought that his feet and knees would detach from their joints. But again, no
monku
, no complaints.

They took the subway, and from there, more walking. The sun seemed to drop all of a sudden, painting a silvery glow in the gray skies. At least the sidewalks were pristine, not a crack or a bump from an overgrown tree root in sight. The drapes of the exclusive apartments were wide open, showing off the units’ contents—antique lamps and polished tables. Mas would be worried that revealing all that wealth would invite robbers, but this was an area so rich that any evildoers would instantly stand out. In fact, Mas was surprised that an undercover policeman didn’t pop out from a hiding place to question him. He was, however, with the best alibi he could ask for, the all-American Tug Yamada.

They finally stopped in front of one of the multilevel apartments. “This is New York’s Buddhist church,” said Tug.

“Ha—” Mas kept his mouth open as he checked out each floor of the concrete building. Didn’t look like any temple he had come across before. Even the Seabrook Buddhist Temple seemed more sacred than this.

Tug explained that he’d visited this temple a couple times in 1946. Outside, it couldn’t compare with the grand temples in California, but inside was the familiar smell of incense and the golden altar, Tug remembered. Christianity had touched Tug by then, so he had hidden his dead friend’s worn Bible underneath his coat while he listened to the familiar chant of the priest.

“Look, Mas.” Tug pointed to a huge statue of a Japanese man standing behind an iron fence outside the neighboring apartment. The height of at least two men, he wore a curved, umbrella-shaped hat and cloak. He held a staff in front of him like a candle that would give off light. “This is new to me.”

“Izu see dat before,” Mas murmured. Some kind of
erai
leader, but he couldn’t place the name. Wasn’t that the same kind of statue standing on the grounds of the eastern-most temple in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo?

Tug walked over to a plaque. “This statue is originally from Hiroshima. Survived the bomb, like you.”

Then Mas faintly remembered seeing the statue a couple of miles northwest of Hiroshima’s ground zero. How had it come to be moved to New York? thought Mas.

At first the statue looked totally out of place, fenced in behind an iron gate on New York’s Riverside Drive. But the longer Mas stared at it, the more at home it seemed to be.

chapter fifteen

And the older a Japanese garden, the more natural it looks, and added years serve only to increase its glories.

—Takeo Shiota

Mas walked through the long plastic strips hanging from the doorway of the grocery store. The Korean shopkeeper was perched on a stool next to the cash register this time. Maybe business was slow this morning, thought Mas.

“Haven’t seen you in a couple of days,” the shopkeeper said as Mas approached the counter.

“I really goin’ home now,” Mas announced, drumming his callused thumbs against the counter’s rubber surface. “Tomorrow.”

“Good to go home.”

Mas nodded.

“Talk to my sister last night. She says it’s seventy degrees over in L.A.”

“Oh, yah.” It would be good for his muscles and joints to feel the beating of the sun again. Yet a part of Mas was going to miss the coldness. It made him move around more than he ever would, even in spring.

“Marlboro?” The shopkeeper started to reach for a carton of cigarettes, but Mas shook his head. He remembered what Takeo’s doctor had said.
You need to cut back or quit altogether, Mr. Arai. Don’t you want to see your grandchild graduate from high school?
That was a ridiculous challenge; Mas didn’t even know if he could count that high, but what if he beat the odds, confounded all the handicappers and prognosticators at the local lawn mower shop? Instead he reached for a package of Juicy Fruit gum. A jumbo pack almost as wide as a deck of cards. Seventeen sticks should keep him busy on the plane. And in terms of overdosing on sugar, who cared about that? Since he had no teeth anyway, it didn’t make much difference.

He took out a dollar, but the shopkeeper pushed the money back toward Mas. “Free,” he said. “On the house.”

M
as got on an underground train on his way to the Eighteenth Street station for Joy’s exhibition opening. Lloyd had plotted Mas’s path on both subway and street maps so carefully that Mas thought that each footstep had been calculated. Neither Lloyd nor Mari could make it, because of Takeo, so Mas was supposed to be the Arai-Jensen household representative.

As he sat in the train car, Mas thought about what it was really going to be like when he returned to the house in Altadena. He had spoken to Haruo earlier, updating him on all the news, including the latest, that Larry Pauley had been arrested at the Canadian border. He had been carrying one hundred thousand dollars in cash and was on his way to purchase a Thoroughbred reared in British Columbia.

Haruo had news of his own. “When you get back, there’s sumbody you gotsu to meet,” he said. “Izu gotsu a new friend.”

Mas’s ears perked up. He had heard this tone of voice before. He knew what it was about even before Haruo went further.

“She’s a routeman. You knowsu, buys flowers at the Market and delivers them all ova the place. Sheezu been doin’ dis ever since the fifties.”

A routeman? Must be a big, strong woman, one who could easily toss Haruo from one side of the room to another. But then Haruo was partial to strong women, as all Japanese American men were.

“How’s Tug doin’?” Haruo had asked.

Sitting in the train car on his way to the art gallery, Mas honestly wasn’t sure. Tug had said some strange things last night, that Joy would never get married and have children like Mari.
How do you know?
Mas had asked him.
Joy still young. Has time.
But Tug had just nodded his head sadly, saying that it wasn’t in the cards for her.

Mas ended up at the gallery a little late—he had taken a couple of wrong turns, in spite of Lloyd’s detailed maps—and sure enough, there was Tug, wearing a light-blue suit and a red and blue striped tie. With all the cigarette smoke from the young people waiting outside, Tug looked like he was emerging from a mist from the heavens.

“Sorry Izu late,” Mas apologized.

“No problem,” Tug said, opening the gallery’s glass door.

The pervading color was black, which made Mas feel that he was at a funeral reception. He thought that he had seen a flash of red in a corner, but that was actually a windowpane lit up from the back. As he got closer, he noticed that red raindrops bled down the glass. The artwork was aptly labeled,
Blood Rain
. Mas, who had seen enough blood on this trip, moved to a ceramic hot dog and bun the size of a small sports car, and then a mound of trash, complete with sanitary napkins and empty beer cans.

“Whatsa point?” he asked Tug about the trash installation. “Dis on every street corner.”

“The guy’s famous, I guess.” Tug read the label. “Selling for three thousand.”

Three thousand? Could pay one third of my new credit card bill. Mas imagined throwing down fresh grass cuttings and a rusty Pennsylvania push lawn mower. How much would these thin
hakujin
pay for that?

More black clothes, but no sign of Joy. There was an African American woman with a huge wrapped yellow headdress the size of a beehive. And a
hakujin
woman dressed in an old black kimono cinched at the waist with a piece of dyed blue fabric. Mas grimaced. Although this woman maybe didn’t know any better, the kimono she was wearing was strictly reserved for men and for funerals. And the belt was
furoshiki
, a piece of cloth that Chizuko had used to wrap around bamboo containers of
musubi
, rice balls wrapped in black seaweed. When Mas brought that to Tug’s attention, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t matter, Mas,” Tug said. “This is America.”

Besides Mas and Tug, there was another Asian face—a young woman wearing a pair of
monpe
pants, the pantaloons, cut at the calves, that Japanese peasants wore in the rice paddies. But instead of straw
zori
slippers, the woman wore military boots, not that different from the ones Tug had probably had in Europe. Mas feared that Tug was going to try to make conversation with the girl. She must have sensed it, too, because she disappeared in the crowd of black as soon as Tug made eye contact.

Waiters came around often, offering glasses of wine and strange appetizers. As usual, Tug declined the wine, with Mas accepting each one of Tug’s rejects. The same went for the Ritz crackers topped with caviar, sour cream, and avocado. Who would have known such a strange concoction to taste so good?

“Wherezu Joy?” Mas asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tug. His military-trained eyes surveyed the crowd, searching, searching.

The two friends finally landed up in a corner, surrounded by X-rays illuminated by metal light boxes.

“This reminds me of Dr. Hayakawa’s office,” Tug said, referring to a gastrointestinal specialist in Pasadena who had yanked out Tug’s gallbladder last year.

While doctors’ offices always made Mas feel cold and alone, this X-ray gallery felt warm, like a line of fireplaces glowing from the middle of the wall. The X-rays were cut up and brightly colored in fluorescent paint. One light box held a montage of head X-rays, with a negative of a girl in the center.

Mas lowered his reading glasses from his head to his nose. In the photo negative, the girl’s teeth were black, the pupils of the sloping eyes white.

“Who’s dis?” Mas asked.

“It’s Joy.”

One light box after another reflected parts of Joy’s life. X-rays of broken arms, a teenage Joy playing basketball. X-rays of a fractured leg, Joy on the steps of the Medical University of South Carolina. Mas couldn’t look at Tug’s face. He didn’t understand what the X-rays meant and wasn’t sure that he even wanted to.

Apart from the light boxes, there was another feature in Joy’s exhibition. A metal contraption that attracted more people in black to wait in line to peer inside.

“Dat part of it?” Mas asked.

Tug examined the side of the machine. He explained that it was an old-time Mutoscope, similar to ones set up in the penny arcade on Disneyland’s Main Street. By cranking the side handle of the scope, you could flip through a series of cards, creating a moving picture. A movie screening for a private party of one.

Tug and Mas stood in line behind the African American woman in the beehive headdress. After she was through, she turned and looked over Mas’s head to smile at Tug. “Wonderful, just wonderful,” she said, readjusting her makeshift hat and turning her attention to the wall of trash.

“Go ahead, Mas.”

“No, you go,” Mas insisted. It was Tug’s daughter, after all. They continued like this for a couple more rounds until it dawned on Mas that Tug was afraid. He needed a friend to be the guinea pig viewer.

Mas took a deep breath and then pressed his face against a viewer shaped like an underwater diving mask. He cranked the handle and saw Tug as a boy on the chili pepper farm with his four oldest brothers and sisters. The old photograph was black-and-white, and then suddenly his overalls were colored a bright blue, the chili peppers green and red. Then the static figures became an animated cartoon, the chili peppers thrown in the air and then segueing to an image of Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the landmark peak within the internment camp. Smoking like a volcano, Heart Mountain erupted, spreading thick red and black lava, which carried a photo of Tug in his Army uniform. Lil appeared, so pristine in a white cotton blouse and her hair permed and curled close to her face. In the background was her barrack in Arkansas, a tar-paper shack that transformed into a giant jaguar. Didn’t make sense, but Mas kept cranking. And finally there was Tug again, wearing one of Lil’s full-length aprons and holding one of their carving knives. Lil was next to him, her hands on his shoulder. Thanksgiving dinner, about five years ago, judging from the style of Lil’s eyeglass frames. Suddenly they moved, no more apron or knife, no more turkey. They were ballroom dancing, something Mas wouldn’t dare to do. The dancing couple dissolved into two smiles fluttering like butterflies. Then blank. Mas continued cranking, and the movie returned to the chili pepper farm.

He let go of the machine’s crank and stood up straight. “Nice,” he said. “Real nice.” Tug hesitated and then leaned down to the scope. He was cranking like a madman; he must have viewed the movie two times straight. Mas didn’t know what the short film meant, but somehow it made him feel happy. And on this trip, you had to grab at any kind of remnants of happiness.

The person behind them began to cough, and even Tug realized that his time was up. He removed his face from the viewer. The line had gotten longer, at least fifteen people deep, but Tug had to experience an encore and went toward the end of the line.

“I wait here,” Mas said, opting for another glass of wine by a display of a basketball covered with Barbie doll heads.

Tug was third in line when a familiar voice called out a few feet away: “Dad.” Surrounded by four women, Joy stood by the broken-arm X-ray light box. Circles of her two braids—one hot pink, the other blue—were pinned to the sides of her head. She wore a shimmering light-blue dress with a plunging neckline held together by a circular brooch.

“Hey, we match,” she said, laughing and pointing to her father’s light-blue suit, his tie, and even his round Optimist Club tiepin. Tug got out of line to talk to Joy, but then a group in black walked in between them. Taking another drink of his wine, Mas watched as Tug desperately tried to make his way to his daughter’s side.