Kira-Kira (8 page)

The previous year my mother had been promoted into a clean section, where she worked cutting drumsticks and thighs off the bodies of the chickens. She was good with her hands and she wore gloves while she worked, but even so, little cuts often marred her delicate hands. And her wrists were so
sore some days, she could hardly move them after work.

She drove into a dirt parking lot outside the fenced area and parked near the few trees. There were already hundreds of cars parked. I looked around. It was so terribly dark. She looked at me. “Keep the doors locked,” she said. “I’ll come out on my break.”

“Okay.” I gazed across the parking lot to the dark highway. “Why can’t we sleep inside while y’all are working?”

“You might steal a chicken.”

I knew she didn’t mean me in particular, but anyone. There were two things the factory manager possessed a morbid fear of: insects and stolen chickens. Where I might hide this stolen chicken was another matter.

My mother looked at her watch. “I’m late for my shower. Stay in the car unless absolutely necessary.” There weren’t quite enough showers for all the employees at once, so everyone was assigned a shower time. My mother got out and hurried toward the plant.

I locked the doors and climbed in back to
be near my brother. I laid his head in my lap. When he was sleeping, he was like a rag doll. Nothing could wake him. I ran my hand over his head. I liked to feel his new bristly crew cut. A long truck moved through the gate at the fence. I could hear the clucking and squawking of chickens. The truck moved behind the building. I couldn’t see, but I knew the chickens were being unloaded.

A big man walked slowly around the building. He didn’t see me. Maybe he was checking for people stealing chickens.

Another car drove into the lot and parked near me. A woman about my mother’s age and a girl about my age got out. The girl glanced at me, hesitated, and then walked over. I lowered my window. Her mother glanced over but kept heading toward the plant.

“Hi,” said the girl.

“Hi.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Waiting for my mother. What’re you all doing?”

“I do the laundry every morning. Then my uncle comes and picks me up on his way to
work, and I hang around his office.” She paused, then repeated proudly, “My uncle works in an office.”

“What kind of office?”

“Insurance.” She spoke casually but was obviously very proud. I wished my father worked in an office! “I do the load for the shift that gets off at four thirty in the morning. Then my uncle brings me back during his lunchtime and I do one more load, and then my mother takes me home. I’m saving for a new school dress.”

“Can I come in and see the plant?” I said.

“You might steal a chicken!” she said, as if scolding me. I saw the man walking around the building again. She saw me studying him and said, “That’s the thug.”

“What’s a thug?”

She looked at him. He was watching us now, but then he kept walking. She leaned toward the car. “Didn’t your mother tell you? The workers are trying to unionize. The thug works for Mr. Lyndon. He discourages union activity. He doesn’t let any of the employees gather in the parking lot, even if they’re not
talking about the union.” She checked her watch and said, “Gotta get the first load going!”

She ran to the building and disappeared around a corner. Insects clustered around the lights at the fence. I wished we would get a house soon so my mother could stop working here. After a pause I decided that I wished that the girl I’d just met would get a house too, and maybe a new dress. My leg was falling asleep, so I shifted Sammy’s head in my lap. He looked so cute. I rolled up the window so the thug couldn’t get in and harm him.

When I next woke, the hot sun was slanting through the windshield. I saw that Sam was still asleep. We used to joke that if nobody remembered to wake him, he would just sleep through the day and night and not get up again until we called him for breakfast. Lynn was like that too. That girl could sleep. Sometimes she slept for twelve hours in a row. But me, I slept restlessly a lot, and sometimes it seemed I barely slept at all. It was funny, because even though I was bad a lot, I also worried a lot about how bad I was. When I worried, I couldn’t sleep.

Perspiration spotted Sam’s forehead. I
wiped him off with my shirtsleeve. I opened a window, and a muggy gust of air shot across my face. If I’d known how to drive and had the keys, I would have driven the car into better shade. Then I saw my mother rushing across the asphalt surrounding the plant. She seemed even smaller than usual as she hurried over. Lynn was already a few inches taller than our mother. I pushed the car door open.

“I was so worried!” she said.

“I saw the thug walking!” I said.

“What thug?”

“The man who works for Mr. Lyndon to keep anyone from gathering and doing union activity.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“A girl. I kept the door locked!”

“You are not to talk to that girl again. And you are not to call that man a thug. He is an employee of Mr. Lyndon. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah—yes. But, Mom? What’s ‘union activity’?”

“A union is when all the workers get together and fight the very people who have
provided them with a job and the very people who pay the employees money to give them the means to buy a house someday.”

“So a union is bad?”

“It’s wrong to fight the people who are trying to help you.”

She looked at Sam sleeping so peacefully. I felt proud of myself that we were doing fine. She noticed the sweat on Sam’s face and got in and started the car. She pulled directly under a tree but kept the motor running. She tried the air conditioner. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. This time it worked. The noise was loud, though. Once, we had turned on the air conditioner and driven through various neighborhoods where my mother could admire the houses. Now she lay back against the car seat. I noticed a few white hairs that I’d never seen before. She was thirty-three, two years younger than my father. She was starting to look tired all the time. Usually when my parents were home, they were eating or sleeping. They didn’t eat with us because we ate earlier. We never did anything together anymore.

After a moment I heard my mother breathing evenly. Many minutes passed, and I worried she was going to be late. I didn’t know what time it was, but she must have been on her lunch break. Still, I didn’t think she got long for lunch. I watched the shadows of the trees move over the dirt. Finally, I said, “Mom?”

She shot up as if I’d thrown ice on her. She didn’t even say good-bye, just mumbled something about showering and then sped back toward the factory. I had never seen her run so fast before. Her feet pounded across the asphalt. Because she’d come out here into the dirty world, maybe she needed to take another shower before she started work again. I felt guilty that I hadn’t woken her sooner.

When Sam finally woke up, I fed him rice balls and water. We played with special little kid cards for a while. To tell the truth, he was so young, it was kind of dull to play cards with him. I let him win two games to make him happy, but I took seven games, just so he wouldn’t forget I was the older sister.

Later I read some books to him, and afterward we slept some more. When our mother drove us home, we were tired from doing nothing all day in the hot car. My mother smelled funny. The factory workers weren’t allowed to take unscheduled breaks, so they all wore pads in case they needed to use the bathroom. It smelled like my mother had used her pad. I decided that someday when I was rich, I was going to buy the factory and let the workers use the bathroom whenever they wanted.

chapter 8

W
HEN WE RETURNED
home from the factory, we were surprised to find Lynnie lying in bed. She didn’t feel well, so Amber’s mother had sent her home. Her temperature was normal, but she looked kind of green.

“She looks gross,” I said.

“Shut up!” snapped my mother. I stepped back, as if she’d struck me. I had never heard my delicate, polite mother say “shut up.”

“It came on suddenly,” Lynn said. “We were eating cookies and talking about school in the kitchen, and all of a sudden, I got sick.”

“Is Amber sick too?” asked my mother.

“She feels fine. But I feel dizzy when I sit up.” My mother turned to where Sammy and I were standing.

“You two sleep in the living room tonight. Maybe it’s contagious.” I drew Sam a step back. My mother seemed to be searching her mind. “Maybe it’s the measle? You never had it. Katie either.” My mother spoke perfect English, but every so often when she was upset, she slipped. She didn’t seem upset on the outside, but I knew she was inside. It was like the time she broke her leg and she kept saying, “I breaked my leg.” I drew Sam another step back.

Lynn got tired more often lately. My parents talked about her a lot. Meanwhile, they scolded me, and even Sammy, more and more often. Our parents didn’t really have time for us anymore because they liked to spend all their extra energy thinking about Lynn.

When Lynn felt good, she had a lot of energy, so I never thought of her as sickly. She was the only one of us who ever went to the doctor. The doctor usually gave her suckers,
which made Sam and me jealous. Also, she got to stay home from school whenever she was sick. So I had thought of her as lucky. But today she seemed worse than usual.

My mother made me take Sam a couple of doors down to watch TV at the Muramotos’ apartment. They were the only ones in the apartments with a TV. Television was such a treat. Fortunately, the Muramotos liked
The Twilight Zone
, so we got to watch that every week with them. Now we let ourselves in and sat on the couch with Mrs. Muramoto, who was watching the news. She loved the news because her husband had a low, clear voice, and she said that if he were
hakujin
—white—he could work as a newsman on TV. He wasn’t home now. He was working with my father at the hatchery. Sometimes I thought he made his voice sound lower than it was naturally. He liked to sit alone in the kitchen reading the newspaper out loud as if he were a newsman.

“Where’s Lynn?” asked Mrs. Muramoto. She was a quiet woman who worked for a tailor.

“She’s tired again,” I said. I always told people she was “tired,” not “sick.” We watched
the news and a couple of game shows, and then I took Sammy back home. My parents were in the bedroom with Lynn, so I filled the bath for Sam and read to him while he sat in the bathtub. That was his favorite thing: getting read to in the bathtub. After his bath I got his pajamas for him and made up the couch for him to sleep on. Ordinarily, I didn’t like to do work around the house, but taking care of Sam was the exception.

Unfortunately, if Sam was sleeping on the couch, that would leave the living-room floor for me. I didn’t see why we couldn’t sleep in our regular beds. If Lynn was contagious, we would get sick just from living in the same apartment. Her germs were probably all over the place by now.

I took a bath in Sam’s old water and laid out some blankets on the living-room floor. When I was a little girl, sleeping on the floor always seemed like a treat. We used to beg our mother to let us sleep on the floor. It was like camping. Now that I was older, the floor felt hard. In a few minutes my mother came in looking annoyed. I knew it was because I
hadn’t wiped the ring around the bathtub, but I didn’t say anything. I was in a bad mood because the floor was hard.

My mother seemed exasperated. She was kind of crazy about cleanliness. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she said. My father came up behind her. Even he seemed annoyed with me, and he almost never got annoyed.

“Katie,” he said, “how many times does your mother have to tell you to wipe the ring in the bathtub?”

“I don’t see why I have to sleep on the floor,” I said.

My father’s face darkened. I felt a little scared. He never got truly mad at us, ever. That was our mother’s job.

My mother looked as if she was going to cry. But I was famous for being hardheaded. Maybe it was because Lynn had always let me have my way. So now I pulled the covers over my head. I was shocked when my mother pulled the covers off and yanked me up by my arm. My father rested his hand on her to restrain her. She started crying. I didn’t know
what was going on: It was just a bathtub ring. My father looked at me sternly. “I want you to clean the bathtub
now
,” he said very quietly.