The turtle house, p.7
The Turtle House, page 7
“How’s it going in your group?” Aimee asked, applying a layer of slick lip gloss. “Darren’s supposed to be back in about fifteen minutes for questions. Think you’ll be ready to break by then?”
After the first studio night, we all thought that Darren was going to let the TA take over check-in duties, but he had surprised us by sharing the responsibility, showing up at least once a week. His visits were helpful, always generous with his compliments and his observations. The last time, he handed each one of us a beer as we left the building, a party favor for surviving another long night.
Aimee shimmied her skirt down so the top sat even with her hip bones, revealing a still-tan stomach, which meant that she undoubtedly fake-baked. Somewhere, I tried not to imagine where, she probably had one of those Playboy bunny sticker outlines used to check the status of one’s roasting.
“Darren’s sweet. I bombed the first part of this assignment, and he said that he’d help me figure out where I went wrong,” she said. I wondered if Darren was the reason for this late-night primping. I felt drab and stale compared to Aimee, who looked as glossy and fresh as she did that morning. I quickly told myself that looks didn’t matter and that Darren had said I was one to watch because of my intellect. I mean, did Aimee have an Outlandish Word of the Day calendar that she tore off every morning?
“Hey, Darren mentioned all of us going to Cain & Abel’s. Thursday-night drink specials. He’s buying the first round. Did he say anything to your group?”
Envious, I said that he hadn’t, he was too busy discussing our work, to which she fluttered her long mascaraed lashes.
Back in our conference room, I told my group what Aimee had told me about Cain & Abel’s.
“Fuckers! Getting in good, are they? I’m going,” Bradley said, wadding up a piece of graph paper and tossing it toward the wastebasket next to the door.
“You’re pathetic. Darren only said something to them because of Aimee,” Rochelle said. “And you missed.”
I looked down and my contact lens bubbled again out of my left eye. I picked it up and held it to the light, noticing that the tiny tear had grown down the middle.
“Whatever. I’m doing this for my grade—and yours,” Bradley said.
“I have class at six a.m.,” Antares said. “And that’s not my scene.”
“Drinks are free at home,” Rochelle said.
I didn’t say anything, but I knew I’d go, even if I could see only half of the campus clearly. I couldn’t tell if I was starstruck, in the throes of a crush, or just desperate for someone to believe in me.
Grandminnie whispers something in Japanese while she hands me my hoodie and kicks my slippers toward my feet. Then she asks why I’m being a scarediddy cat. She grabs my wrist, her short fingernails digging into the flesh where my pulse beats fast, and pulls me up.
“I’m not scared, I’m exhausted,” I groan. I follow her quietly down the stairs, but can’t stop thinking about that night.
At Cain & Abel’s, Darren was ordering Texas Teas for everyone.
“These things are strong, ladies,” Bradley had said, gulping. “Watch yourselves.”
Rochelle, who had said no but had walked over with us anyway, flipped him off.
Darren had commandeered a long indoor picnic table, the wood worn smooth and dark with beer stains. He sat on the bench at the end while the members of Group 5 clustered around him. Aimee sat on the table, her long legs stretched out below her. Every few minutes, someone would yell out, Hey, Aim!
“I’m here a lot,” she said.
“Like, she has to be smart, right? Or she wouldn’t be in the program?” Rochelle whispered to me.
“Tell us about Berkeley,” Bradley said to Darren. “That’s my dream school. My dad wants me on the East Coast, of course . . .”
“Which was your favorite internship?” a Group 5 guy asked.
I listened to Darren’s careful answers and watched all of us vying for his attention. Aimee was pointing her body toward Darren, then Bradley, like a car careening out of control. The group was now talking about our first individual projects, about which studio areas they had already scoped out. We were going to inherit space from the graduating class before us, gone in May. Everything would be stripped bare and then we’d be released upon the floor to find our studio homes for the remainder of our time in school.
“How about it, Lia?”
“Pardon?”
Darren smiled at me. I felt my eyesight fluctuate, trying to focus. My lack of vision, combined with whatever combination of liquor that made up the Texas Tea, made me feel dizzy.
“Residential or commercial?”
I hadn’t allowed myself to think about specialization. It felt silly even to contemplate it—I couldn’t manage to come up with a design that didn’t elicit jeers. As I dropped off into a shallow sleep each night, I wondered if I was cut out for this place. Everyone seemed to have something figured out, not just their life path, but who they were at their center. Had they built this awareness during their teen years while I was trying to find a group of friends to sit with at lunch? Was this some sort of inheritance, a gift from their super-confident parents? I had always felt a distance, a disturbance within my core. My mother claimed that it was normal because I was bright and serious. But it was my father who told me, one night during an asthma treatment, the hissing nebulizer strapped to my face, that it might be because I was just Japanese enough and people can sniff out anyone different. And once you’re treated differently, you feel different, and that’s just that.
There was a buzzing in my head—like a jigsaw had been plugged in and was splitting me in half. Say commercial, because that’s what makes the most money and makes you into a starchitect.
“No idea. I don’t even know if—”
But Bradley cut me off and started talking about some huge architecture scandal, and with relief, I pulled my body from the group, finding comfort in the edge of the conversation.
Another Texas Tea was shoved into my hand by a Group 5 girl who had the soft white face of a dollop of whipped cream.
I knew I shouldn’t.
But Darren raised his glass to Groups 5 and 8, the most hard-core of the class, and so I sipped. The rest of the night is like a torn-up photo.
Bradley disappeared. Then Aimee is there, oddly serious, wearing someone’s straw cowboy hat and talking about how she loves homes where the living area and kitchen interconnect—how she used to babysit her cousins and struggled to make them lunch and see what they were doing in the living room, so she had suggested to her uncle that he knock down the wall that wasn’t load-bearing and create a great room. He had done just that.
“Can you believe I didn’t even know what an architect was? Everyone in my town works in the oil fields or is a teacher or nurse or something. I asked the librarian at my school the name of the job that didn’t build the houses, but made the plans for them.” Aimee cackled, her head thrown back.
I understood. Our towns sounded similar.
“So, she’s clearly going residential,” I remember Rochelle saying as she walked away.
The girl with the whipped-cream face waved goodbye. Bradley showed up again. The lights went on hot and bright, and the music was turned down. Then Darren was leading us all out to his Jeep-looking thing.
“Whoa—is that a Defender?” Bradley asked. “Don’t see those ever around here.”
We all squished in: Aimee in front, Rochelle on Bradley’s lap, me in the center, and some other guy on my right. The back bench seat was hard. I was now wearing the straw cowboy hat.
It felt like we were driving slow, and I had the sudden impression that we were kids in a carpool minivan, listening to Aerosmith, which made me giggle to myself. After many stops, it was just Darren and me. I was still in the dorms and on the west side of campus. It was part of my financial aid package, so it was a dorm or nothing for me. “Love in an Elevator” began to blare through the Defender.
“Want me to pull over so you’re not stuck in the back?” he asked.
“I’m fine, really,” I said, though I wondered how I was last when I actually lived the closest to Cain & Abel’s.
“National Merit kid?” Darren asked.
“One of the semifinalist ones. I got a couple of other scholarships that fill in the holes.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It makes my folks really happy. I mean, I don’t think I would have ended up here without it.”
“Me, too. The scholarship. At Columbia. And I was in the dorms, also. It was either that or a well-designed cardboard box. What the others don’t get is how little they’ll be seeing of their own apartments soon. And you’ll have the easiest commute.”
“Is it that much more chaotic?”
“Every bit. And amazing. I’d go back in a heartbeat. That’s why I’m so stoked to be here.”
We pulled into the U-shaped drive, and he parked as close as he could to my dorm. Then he hopped out, and I watched him with my one good eye go through the headlights at a mid-jog. I’m important enough for him not to walk, I thought. He opened the passenger door and popped the front seat forward, extending his hand to help me out.
He cleared his throat.
“So why are you winking at me?”
I felt myself redden as I stood in front of him. He didn’t let go of my hand.
“No, it’s not— I tore my contact earlier, and I’ve been trying to see out of one eye all night.”
Darren grinned and I could tell that he was about to laugh.
“Hey.” He squeezed my hand. “It seems like you’re flailing a bit, let me help. Come by my office next week.”
I let his words float between us.
“Like during your office hours?” I asked.
Darren looked over my shoulder at the sound of another car pulling up, rap spilling out of the open window. He let go of my hand, but then looked back to me and smiled.
“Sure. Or whenever. Consider me a friend.”
Consider me a friend, I think, now. The squeak of the storm door brings me back. We’re outside, and Grandminnie has produced a small flashlight from her pocket.
We locate the boxes behind Dad’s lawn mower in the garage. My grandmother points the flashlight at the largest one. I pull open the flaps and there, beneath a couple of wrapped teacups and porcelain odds and ends rescued from the house, is the baby-blue bowling bag. I carefully shimmy it free.
JAC in gold letters shines on the top in the center, right below the teeth of the zipper.
“Grandfather’s?” I ask, and Grandminnie nods. “Why a bowling ball? Why did you want this?”
The zipper is sticky and slow, louder than modern ones, and when the mouth of the bag is wide, I reach in and do not feel the cold smoothness of a ball, but something hard and bumpy. I wrestle it out, and my grandmother takes a deep breath and shines the light on it.
It looks like a sculpture in black stone. But it’s so dark, the light is sucked into the— I don’t know what to even call it. I squint. A turtle! With a bushy tail and a yawning mouth on its face. I take the light from Grandminnie and try to make out more detail. I place it down carefully and fumble around Dad’s workbench to find the camping lantern and fire it up. I realize that it’s not black, but dark gray with tiny glints of crystals.
“Minogame. It’s a minogame onigawara. Goes on the roof, on the corners.”
“Like the—”
“Yes. Same one. It’s as old as Japan because it’s made of mountain soil. Soil that is baked.”
I watch as my grandmother gently traces the long, variegated tail. To me, it looks like a wiglet stuck on the turtle’s back. The turtle has ears the shape of a yappy chihuahua’s. The eyes protrude; the mouth looks like it’s asking for a treat.
“It’s a little weird-looking,” I finally say.
“Oh, maybe to you. Maybe to someone who doesn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“So much luck. Such a long life in turtles. They carry their homes on their backs! And this, this tail is moss because the turtle is old.”
“And the ears?”
“Okay, that’s what you called it—a little weird. Gods need big ears. But see this?” Grandminnie traces the mouth and at the very corners, it turns up a bit. The smallest smile possible on a mythic turtle god.
“He called it a happy turtle. He climbed onto the roof, and it took all his strength. But the wood it was bolted to was rotten and finally it came off. We called it a pet. He was so silly, so—oh, what do you call it—goofy. Just a happy boy.”
“Y’all did this before he married that other girl?”
My grandmother laughed, her mouth as wide as the turtle’s, and I can see the glint of a silver filling in a molar in the back. Her laugh calms me, takes away the buzz of worry from the back of my brain, away from Cain & Abel’s, away from Darren’s hot handshake that night. She squeezes my knee and then pats my leg. Then she leans over and kisses the turtle on its head. Nuzzles it with her nose. The Coleman lantern hisses a little, and we stay there for a while with the minogame, my grandmother animated by the heat of past love, cuddling with a cold statue.
Chapter 8
Kadoma
Late Summer 1943
For three days, Mineko didn’t answer the notes from Akio that he had delivered by bike messenger. They were not declarations of fault, but more friendly inquiries: When are we meeting for lessons? Are you ill? Finally, the phone, installed just in case the train station ever needed her father, rang. Mineko heard her father answer it, and heard him say, my daughter Mineko? and then he made a noise like a surprised laugh.
Hiroshi came into the backyard, where Mineko was perched moodily on the swing.
“A young man called to tell you the turtles are hungry and it will be feeding time in one hour.” Her father looked confused, but handed her the little slip of paper.
Mineko felt the cartilage in her ears burn as she accepted the message. She didn’t look at it, but held it between her knees as she swung slowly. Her father disappeared back into the house, called out to Hana, and asked her to take a walk with him. Mineko was happy he felt good enough to walk, but she caught him in the corner of her eye grimacing and rubbing his hollowed-out belly.
He called from the window, “We’re taking a stroll. Hisako is coming with us. You may join or, maybe, go feed these turtles?”
Mineko’s cheeks flashed hot. How dare Akio use her turtles at her house as bait for her. She looked away from her father as she said she’d stay at the house. When they were gone, she wandered the garden, checking on the progress of the late-blooming yellow roses that climbed the trellis outside her room.
Mineko pondered this note. It was a clever message, she had to give Akio credit. She hadn’t been to the turtle house since the movie incident, afraid he’d show up and afraid just being there would make her ache for him. But staying away made her doubly angry. Not only had she allowed herself to feel something for him, something pleasant and tender, she had allowed him into her secret place of belonging.
I will go and tell him to leave and live his life. That the turtle house is mine and I’m done sharing it. Mineko found her shawl, gathered up a couple of radish tops from the kitchen, and took off across town and up the steep hill, her heart pounding as she traveled.
The sun was slowly beginning its descent, the shadows cast about were lovely, hiding the pockmarks in the road. So much was going undone now. The trees near the little Kadoma temple had been cut back too far, the grasses scalped, either by ill-equipped fill-in gardeners or because of an order to do so, a generous cut lasting longer. But the shadows, too, hid this, and things looked almost as they always had, enough so Mineko could pretend that the war didn’t exist.
As she neared the turtle house, she felt a little jolt of cool air. What would he say to her? She had never even sent him word that they would no longer be meeting. She just failed to show. She suddenly saw how silly this was. How childish. What could he possibly think—a boy betrothed to that beautiful girl, a boy heading back to school where he would rise to the status of his father or beyond?
Doubt swarmed her, and she stopped just before the path that led to the gazebo. Usually, when she was afraid or worried or embarrassed, she would just imagine herself swimming or watching her turtles. She pictured herself breaststroking, cutting through water, facedown. But now even swimming reminded her of Akio. She had even given away her favorite pastime! And now, she had nothing. Anger swelled in her again. How stupid! How idiotic!
Before she could stop herself, she marched down the path to the gazebo, and when she saw Akio sitting there, feeding the turtles, and he looked up, shy, she didn’t stop until she was peering over him.
“How dare you call me to my spot. These are my turtles,” she spat, furiously.
Akio stood, leaving the bag of food he had brought—the cores of several cabbages—on the ground.
“Settle down, Mineko. These aren’t really your turtles . . .” he began, but Mineko stomped her foot, the gazebo shuddered. Akio grasped the railing.
“But they are. You didn’t even know they existed before me. You have other spots to go. With other people! You thought this house was haunted!”
“What is this about? I called because I was worried that I had said something wrong and that’s why you skipped our lessons. Now, I’m certain that I—”
“Wrong? Wrong?” Mineko panted her words. The world burned hot. She realized that she was too close to Akio, that she could smell his breath, could see the not-yet freckles on his nose, hiding beneath a layer of skin. She stepped back and onto the radish tops that she had let drop from her hand. They squished beneath the heels of her shoes, and she stumbled a little bit. The gazebo shook again.
Akio was the first to laugh. “What is this? What are we doing?”
“I’m angry,” Mineko sputtered. “I’m angry because sometimes I just don’t understand things.”
