The turtle house, p.19
The Turtle House, page 19
She was not a drinker. While others picked it up early during occupation, she never had. It seemed foolish, to dull one’s senses in an already senseless place and time. But the frothy part of the punch was now gone, leaving a cheerful pink liquid at the bottom of the bowl. Mineko leaned forward for a sniff and her nostrils burned. She looked over at Etsuko, holding court with the Church Girls, and Mineko thought of forever, of never returning again, and took the ladle and filled a cup to the brim, sipping as she walked, choking a little as she went. She listened to Etsuko chatter about Bartlesville, the town in Oklahoma where she was set to live. The others threw the names of their new towns out as well, so many names that Mineko had never heard before. After a while, bored with the conversation and a bit dizzy, Mineko excused herself and went looking for the others.
Outside, she wandered to the playground, where the brides who had been drinking were gathered, singing.
“I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places . . .” They were off-key and sounded nothing like the Andrews Sisters, but there they were, singing to the moon, swinging on the swing set and sliding down the steep slide. A mound of petticoat slips and dye-to-match pumps lay near the picnic table.
“Mineeeeekkkoooo! Always so serious! Come sing with us!” one girl squealed before going down the slide, a little too quickly, and landing with a thump on her bottom, causing an explosion of giggles.
“We need to start calling each other our American names,” another bride said bossily. “I’m Cindy, you’re Mollie, you’re Jean-Anne, you’re Nicky, and she’s Minnie.”
“Like the mouse,” Mineko said with a sigh. She hiccupped and again, giggles from the group.
“You’re lucky! Minnie is at least close to your name. Jean-Anne is so hard to say! How can I be someone else when I can’t even pronounce the name! I sound silly!” said the woman Mineko had known as Isumi.
“But we look beautiful,” the woman who was now Mollie said, putting her arms around the two women closest to her, stumbling a bit. “We look like beautiful American women, and I know we’ll have very good lives.”
The women huddled together, Mineko’s head buzzing. She imagined herself alone among a bunch of black cattle like in the sketches James had done so long ago. Alone. She suddenly missed Mae and Paulie, and the little base house with the humming fridge and the porch light that blinked on and off whenever she shut the door too hard. It wasn’t home, but it was as much of a home as she’d had in years. Why, it wasn’t all that bad! Now Mineko felt foolish for ever disliking it. The lanes that gathered water with every rainstorm, the kids splashing home in the puddles. The backfiring of the soldiers’ jeeps and the way all the Japanese women ducked and covered each time, no matter how many times it happened. She liked doing the laundry in the sun next to Etsuko and hanging it on the lines together. James was often gone, but that was a blessing. Who knew what he did, who knew who he was with. There was always food and always someone to speak to, even if it was just about which shampoo was better for their daughters’ hair.
Mineko said her goodbyes, and she walked quickly, blisters forming because of her new shoes, then she reached down and took them off, running in her pantyhose. A few old mamas had gathered all the children together at two houses, and Mineko stopped by to find Paulie asleep with all the other babies on a pallet on the floor. Mae was still awake, running wild with a few other girls in the backyard, high on sugary gumdrops and cookies.
At home, she washed their feet and hands, washed their faces and behind their ears. She tucked tiny Paulie into the basket next to her bed, then, thinking about a drunken James, coming in and stumbling over him, she moved him to her side of the bedroom. Mae wouldn’t leave her, suddenly scared of the dark, so Mineko let her curl up close, and then dangled her arm over the edge of the bed so she could stroke Paulie’s cheek.
“Are you scared, Mama?” Mae said. Mineko was thinking about the boat, the endless miles of waves.
“Do you know how many people I had to talk with to let us leave? If I said one wrong word, they would keep us here. So maybe that’s a good thing, right? Must be a very wonderful place to be protected by so many questions.”
Mineko could feel Mae nod her head next to her shoulder. Before long, she felt the little girl’s body flinch, and then relax. Mineko leaned over and touched Paulie’s nose again. Had her own mother loved her like she loved these two children? Had she touched her eyelids in the night, had she felt her downy head in the darkness? She felt as if a war of words and thoughts was battling inside her. Was she scared? Was this forever? Will she be alone?
“No,” she told herself aloud, and Mae wiggled a bit in her sleep. No, no, no. And whatever was facing her, she would be fine, just fine.
Chapter 19
Dennis, Texas
April 1, 1999
We get back to Autumn Leaves in time for Fiesta Night. Brightly colored papel picado banners hang on the gas-log fireplace in the entry, and on each flat surface is a sombrero. There’s one lone mariachi roaming, a white guy in full black-and-silver regalia, playing a twelve-string.
“You’re going to hate Oriental Night,” I say as I look around.
I am carrying Grandminnie’s massive duffel, and she’s toting the binder of photocopies. She spent the trip home three-hole punching and arranging as I drove. I had read that panic attacks are like waves, that they can last only so long and then they recede. If that’s true, then between Round Rock and Burleson, I was in the middle of a hurricane. We stopped for gas and I raced into the stinky brown-tiled bathroom to throw up, but nothing was there. I just dry heaved over the porcelain sink.
My grandmother drops the flyer for Fiesta Night on my lap. There will be salsa and guacamole and watered-down elderly-appropriate margaritas served during happy hour. The dinner menu is enchiladas, rice, and beans. Dessert is flan. Exactly what I wanted in Austin, served here at Autumn Leaves. It’s a sick joke.
Grandminnie shoves me her cordless and I call Mom to let her know I’ll be staying.
My grandmother has applied a new coat of Shiseido red lipstick. She looks at me, opens the apartment door, and holds out her hand. We walk to get our fill of appetizers before the place becomes a sea of white hair.
After dinner, we open the balconette doors and Grandminnie squats close to the edge, smoking and dropping ash over the side into the cone-shaped Burford hollies below. We watch the sun disappear in silence. The three Autumn Leaves margaritas, equaling only one-half a normal margarita, have calmed me a bit, and I lie across Grandminnie’s bed on my stomach. The minogame is out of her bowling bag and looking at me from the nightstand. I ask for my grandmother’s photo of Akio, and she digs through her bra and hands it to me.
“We need to get this thing scanned and reprinted. Laminate a copy and then you can keep this original safe somewhere.”
Akio stares back at me, wire-rimmed glasses, a lock of black hair falling across his forehead. I wonder if any other photos of him exist. He’s handsome in a kind way, I think. I might go out with him, if he came up to me and started to chat.
At the beginning of college, I dated a nice guy who eventually transferred to a small private school somewhere in California. I received a couple of letters from him, but that’s it. I went on a few dates the spring of my freshman year and a few more the first semester of my sophomore year. Nothing special. Then it was pretty quiet on the dating front as school took up more and more time. At BT&B, I went out for a couple months with a guy I met at a young professionals gathering, and Stephie and I double-dated with him and his roommate. It was fun until the roommate and Stephie broke up. Mom says my seriousness is intimidating. My friends say I’m a goody-goody, which is somewhat true, and any dude can smell that a mile away. Aunt Mae says I’m the marrying kind and that I’ll be a top-notch mom one day. Dad stays pretty silent on the subject, probably picturing me in footie pajamas still, hair in pigtails.
That Design V fall, after revealing his wife’s miscarriage, Darren was a regular visitor to my studio space. He brought snacks and silly jokes, strange factoids about famous architects, stayed for a few minutes, made an observation or suggestion, and then was gone again. He would sometimes visit other students quickly as well, and I appreciated it when he did, because his attention, albeit kind, was something I couldn’t explain easily to my friends. The rounds of critiques went far better than before, the team more open to my concept and appreciative of how a massive petroleum company could be portrayed through one of nature’s smallest organisms. My presentation, practiced again and again in front of my dorm mirror, went smoothly, and I answered the jury’s questions directly, meeting their eyes, as coached by Darren. Fake it until you make it, kid, he had said. Pretend you’re better and you know more. His advice had worked like a magic incantation.
In the hallway, between presentations, Darren caught up with me and what began as a high five ended with a clasped hand. He moved close and whispered “See?” and I left the Arch Building giddy with success.
Before I drove home for Christmas, Darren had even dropped off a gift for me, clearly a book, wrapped in red-and-white peppermint paper. The note said not to open it in the studio, so I waited until I was at a gas station halfway down I-35, filling up my car and buying a Coke to keep me awake.
Inside was a heavy art-laden first edition of The Architecture of I.M. Pei. A note inside was written in Darren’s block script.
“For your reading pleasure this holiday season. You’ll need it in the spring (hint-hint) and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy your presence. You’ve made an unbearable fall far better than it deserved to be. Yours fondly, DM.”
A rap on the door brought me back to Grandminnie’s apartment. She yells out, gruffly, No thank you, do not need them!
“What was that all about?”
“Antacid cart, I think.”
“No, really? I mean, that’s thoughtful . . .”
“I hate this place. Don’t you forget, I’m moving out into my own house. You can stay here if you want, but I’m leaving.”
“Then maybe I’ll live with you.”
I sit up to see my grandmother point her hand straight at the horizon, dramatically. She juts out her chin. I can tell she’s grinding her teeth. She rocks a little back and forth, thinking.
“You think you can leave problems. Everyone tries that when they’re young. Oh, something awful has happened, I’ll just go, I’ll just run off like a rabbit! But some things follow. Maybe most problems follow, like smoke in your hair.”
“Are we talking about me now?”
“I’m talking about us. I thought, maybe it will be better in Texas, yah? Maybe I can forget everything and make a new life, even if I know James was not too good always. And I did. New life, new language, new foods, new everything. You know the first food I bought at Dimple’s store?”
I think about her favorites. Ice cream, candy bars, orange slices.
“A package of hot dogs. Mae and I loved hot dogs. We ate them for every lunch until we were both sick of them!”
My grandmother laughs at this memory. For a moment I figure she’s back there, in the ranch house kitchen, staring down a hot dog.
“You can’t hide from bad things, Lia. That’s what I know. And when you go back to your problems—”
“You make things right again? Is that what this is all about? I need to face my—”
“Nah, Lia-chan! You never make things right again. Never! Things are just wrong.”
Grandminnie collapses into her chair. She turns to me and makes her finger into a little cannon, pointing it at my chest. There’s a hardness to her expression, one that is both familiar and new to me. She pushes her finger into my sternum, right at the center.
“But you can make things different and maybe, just maybe, part-of-the-way better.”
Book 3
Chapter 20
Curtain, Texas
July 3, 1953
Ghost-white. Not a warm white, but a whiteness where the gray, weathered boards could be seen just below the surface. It was two hours past death, and that’s what Mineko thought, staring at the farmhouse for the first time. They were parked at the end of the gravel drive. They had driven all night. Mae was asleep in the middle and slumped on her lap, Paulie asleep in her arms. She had been hot for hours, stifling in a cardigan, but since both were sleeping peacefully, she had not moved to take it off. So she sat there, James pointing out the landmarks of the ranch. Sweat in her hair and between her breasts and running down her stomach, her eyes taking in the white house and the flatness, a sickness in her throat.
It wasn’t that the land was ugly, she decided, it had a starkness that was interesting. The lack of elevation was jarring; she had never seen any place so level for so far a distance before. The grasses grew tall and swayed in a slight breeze. There were trees along the fence line and up around the house. Pecans, a whole grove of them, James had kept saying, and she didn’t know exactly what this meant, until he said it was a nut tree and she nodded with some understanding.
And where the land turned greener and small bushes and trees sprung up, that was the creek, Curtain Creek, and he said she could look at that later, but it had good fishing and a swimming hole. Mineko felt a wave of thankfulness wash over her. But there were snakes, water moccasins, so it was best to always bring a shotgun with you, just in case. Mineko’s heart sank a little, yet to swim, maybe killing a snake wouldn’t be too awful.
But the house. As they drove closer, Mineko could see that it was nothing more than a tall box of a place with two sides that jutted out. It was perfectly congruent other than that—windows, a long rectangular porch on the front. The brackets that held up the roof of the porch were barely decorative and, like everything else, the trim, the lattice that hid the underbelly of the home, the pillars—white.
“Needs repainting,” James said, “you can help do that this fall.”
“We choose the color?”
“I choose the color.”
“Oh.”
They parked under the shade of one of the pecans. James opened his truck door, bounded out, and left Mineko and the children in the cab. He walked up onto the porch, pushed against the posts to see if they shifted, stomped his feet to check for rot, looked up—what is he looking for? Mineko thought. It wasn’t until later that week, when Mae was stung by a wasp, that she figured it out. James peeked into the windows. Mineko couldn’t see his face, he didn’t turn around nor did she expect him to. Maybe he was happy now, home at last. She hoped he was, but it was a thin want, the long wisp of a spider’s web.
She buried her nose in the top of Paulie’s head. They all smelled of their own flavor of sweat. Hers, like heavily pickled daikon, Mae’s was peppery, and Paulie, with only milk in his belly still, was a sweet sourness. They all needed a long bath and clean clothes. She desired nothing more than quiet and a moment’s peace to take in her new surroundings. If she could just be still—no boat tossing her, no truck bumping her—and have some silence to think. Yes, she could figure it out.
James went into the house, no key needed, closed the door behind him. Mineko looked at Mae, still asleep, her bangs stick-straight and stuck to her face. Paulie was hot in his sleep against her. Should she go in? Should she wait to be invited? As she was trying to figure out her next steps, another truck came down the drive in a cloud of white dust. This truck parked a good distance away. A man with the same thin shoulders as James, the same square jawline but with a smile, a true smile, got out. A woman with blond corkscrew curls tied up in a bandanna, short and curvy with a light bouncy step, was gesticulating to him. Mineko watched her climb up onto the porch—mint-green short pants and a sleeveless peach top. She turned and looked back at Mineko in the truck and, surprised to see someone, hit her companion with the back of her hand and pointed—Mineko could tell they were married. But then they, too, went inside.
Mineko opened the truck door, expecting to feel some sort of breeze, but it was equally hot and still outside. She carefully awoke Mae by shaking her lightly and then pushing her to sitting. Mae opened her eyes and blinked, mouth a little agape, dried saliva on her chin. Mineko retied the bows at the ends of her braids and slid out of the truck, holding Paulie. Clutching Mae’s hand, and with Paulie now gurgling on her shoulder, she walked up to her new home.
“This is where we live now, Mae,” she said in Japanese. Mae nodded.
“It’s kinda funny. I don’t know if I like it,” Mae said, her voice still gravelly with sleep.
“You will always remember this day,” Mineko said to Mae, but Mae didn’t respond, just climbed the steps and, like her father, looked in the windows.
“Do we go in, Mama?” Mae looked up at Mineko. All Mineko had to do was open the door. She wished someone would take her hand and guide her gently in.
Mineko pushed open the door and walked into the darkened room, musty and old. Furniture still covered with white sheets. James had told her his sisters-in-law would come and air the place out. But no one had done any such thing.
In the kitchen, a square box of a room that Mineko hadn’t seen from the front, an obvious add-on, she heard James and his family. She didn’t understand everything that was being said, but she knew that Mae understood all of it, so she watched her daughter’s face as she took it in. The grown-up talk passed over her, boring her, but still she stood close to Mineko, listening.
Mineko had realized upon arrival in California—San Francisco—that base English classes had not been as comprehensive as she had originally thought. But Mae, who had heard English and Japanese from birth, was fluent. So in the quiet, when James had left to wander the motel grounds each night of their four-day drive, or when it was just them, James asleep, and she was nestled next to Mae instead of her husband because James wanted his own bed to stretch out, she would ask Mae what was said. Mineko would lay out her gathered words. Mae would pick them up, one by one, explain mostly they were directions to a new highway or where a good hamburger could be found. A few times they were explanations; home from war with his Japanese wife, yes wife, and their two children. A man wearing overalls and carrying a tire iron had lost a younger brother in Bataan and he was still angry, yes very angry, about this loss. His brother’s buddy had survived and told him all about it. Mae had relayed this solemnly, as if she had killed the brother, as if she had shot him in the back as he relieved himself. A girl who had not even been alive.
