While I Was Away

by Waka T. Brown

  “Waka-chan!” Reiko exclaimed when she opened the door. “What happened, did you forget something?” Tomoko and her mom appeared behind her.

  “No, I . . . I can’t get in. It’s locked and . . . no one’s answering.”

  Reiko’s mom’s expression changed. “Come on in,” she said as she ushered me into the living room I had enjoyed myself in just moments before. Reiko’s mom dialed the phone.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re home! . . . Yes, Waka-chan was a little worried, she came back here when no one seemed to be there. . . . Yes, I’ll walk her right over.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Obaasama was fine! But still . . . why did she close our home off like that? Had she forgotten I was out for dinner? That would be strange too, because Reiko’s mom had just talked with her. It was only 7:30, not late at all.

  Reiko’s mom walked across the street with me. When we entered the gate, the sliding glass door to the kitchen was open. Obaasama stood there, waiting.

  “Konbanwa,” Reiko’s mother greeted my grandmother as she bowed.

  Obaasama bowed in return. “Konbanwa. Thank you for having Waka over, I hope she wasn’t any trouble.”

  “No trouble at all!” Reiko’s mom patted my back as I headed inside. “See you tomorrow!”

  I bowed to her and headed inside. Obaasama slid the door shut behind me.

  I walked past Obaasama to set my randoseru down in the living room when she screamed from behind me.

  “How could you!”

  I froze in my tracks.

  “I couldn’t believe my ears. Who raised you to be such an awful, rude child?”

  I turned around. She didn’t mean me, did she? I was the only child in the house. But how could she mean me? Baka, stupid, perverted, peeping foreigner, yes. But awful and rude? No one had ever described me that way. Ever. What could I have done?

  “How dare you stay at their house! How dare you!”

  I stopped and just stared at this snarling, raging woman I thought I knew, her fury radiating from her, so much I could almost see it, almost feel its heat. I had no idea how to answer. I had no idea if she even wanted me to answer. I had no idea what I did wrong.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Wanting to stay there until ten. No Japanese child would ever impose on another family the way you have—”

  “I didn’t say anything about staying until ten.” I finally found my voice. “They asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. I did want to stay, and I said I did, but I didn’t say—”

  “You did! You did, I heard you. I told Reiko’s mother you could stay just for dinner, and I heard you in the background say you wanted to stay until ten. Don’t you realize what a nuisance you would be?”

  “I didn’t, though. I never would—”

  “Did you invite yourself over for dinner? I bet you did.”

  “I didn’t! They asked—”

  “But did they ask you like they meant it?”

  “Yes! They asked me, and I said—”

  “I bet you didn’t even hesitate. Are those the kind of manners your mother—”

  Oh, don’t you dare bring my mother into this, I thought. “I didn’t. I didn’t invite myself over. They invited me. But I didn’t say I wanted to stay until ten. I didn’t say that at—”

  “Liar!” Obaasama screamed at me. “You did say it, and now you’re lying about not saying it.”

  “I’m not lying. . . .” My voice shook, but I had to defend myself. I knew I was weird and awkward here. Since I always forgot my hat, my skin was darker, not the pale shade people thought was pretty here. I knew I had a funny haircut, and maybe I was a burden, maybe I was a nuisance—no, I knew I was, a burden to my aunts, uncles, cousins, Mr. Adachi, Reiko . . . and maybe the way I spoke made me seem rude when I didn’t mean to be . . . but I didn’t say that. I did not lie.

  “You didn’t stay until ten, but you sure stayed awhile, didn’t you? Did you even stop to think there were other things they might need to do?”

  “They asked me to.” My voice grew weaker. My memories of my time there jumbled. Did I see Mrs. Kobayashi glance at the clock while Reiko, Tomoko, and I snort-giggled over a silly joke? Did I eat more than my share of dinner? No. I didn’t. I didn’t.

  I straightened my back. “I . . . we were having fun.”

  “And now you’re talking back. So unbelievably rude, just stop with your lies. Stop! I’m going to bed now. I don’t care what you do.” And with that, Obaasama turned on her heel and stomped into her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her.

  I stood still, not moving like an animal under attack. When the light turned off in the bedroom, I finally moved, shaking, tiptoeing to the bathroom. I took an extra-long time to wash my clothes. Scrubbing my skirt a few more minutes than I needed to on the washboard and rinsing my shirt more than once, twice, three times, I shivered not only from the chill of the water cooling on my bare skin, but from the fear and shock of my grandmother’s words.

  “Rude!”

  Sticks and stones, I told myself. Water all around me, water I could feel pooling in my eyes. When I washed my hair, I felt the bump on my head, a reminder of a different kind of hurt. Anger replaced shock. I didn’t deserve this.

  “Awful!”

  I didn’t deserve that treatment from my so-called friends, I didn’t deserve this from my own grandmother. I didn’t say I wanted to stay at Reiko’s until 10 p.m. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but her words . . . those words . . . I knew what I said.

  “Liar!”

  She misheard me. I soaked in the steaming o-furo, willing my shivering to stop. Minutes passed, maybe ten, maybe twenty.

  Finally, the heat from the bath seeped into my skin down to my bones and my shivers stopped. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but her words, they broke my . . .

  I didn’t overstay my welcome at Reiko’s house. I didn’t.

  The only place I’d stayed too long was here, with Obaasama.

  Five more weeks. I just needed to survive five more weeks.

  Twenty-Three

  “Ohayou gozaimasu,” I greeted my grandmother the next morning like I always did.

  “Ohayou gozaimasu,” she responded without looking at me.

  She didn’t say anything more to me, so I didn’t say anything more to her.

  I ate alone in silence since Obaasama had already eaten her breakfast. Fine by me because I didn’t want to sit with someone like her anyway.

  When she did her morning calisthenics, I stepped over her outstretched legs on my way to the bathroom.

  “Don’t you know how rude that is?” barked my grandmother.

  I froze. Rude. Again.

  “Your feet are the dirtiest part of your body. Don’t you point them at me!”

  “I didn’t point them at you,” I said.

  “Don’t step over me, that’s just as bad. Can’t you understand even that?”

  I refused to look at her even as I acknowledged I’d heard her with a quick bow.

  I couldn’t wait to leave this place. The countdown was on.

  A class field trip to a potato patch took my mind off my troubles with Obaasama. Following Mr. Adachi, my classmates and I trudged to a nearby farm. By the end of September, it was no longer hot, but it was still sunny. Thankfully, I remembered to bring my hat this time—it only took four months of reminders. My classmates gabbed and horsed around with each other (but not too much, because, you know—head smacks), but I kept to myself, pretending like my surroundings were so interesting I didn’t notice I was groupless. That was my choice, though, and so I had to deal with the consequences. Luckily, the potato patch wasn’t far.

  At the farm, row after row of dirt mounds stretched across a field. Mr. Adachi gathered us around.

  “Each of you get three plants, and you get to keep all the potatoes you find. So . . . dig!” With that, Mr. Adachi set us loose.

  Despite growing up in Kansas, my experience with any sort of farming was limited. I never har
vested potatoes before. So just . . . dig?

  I pulled up my first potato plant. Almost immediately, I found five potatoes. I brushed the dirt off them. What now? My classmates were assembling their potatoes into individual piles. That seemed easy enough. I made a small pile with my five potatoes.

  Was that all there was to it? Were there only about five potatoes per plant? Or were there more? As I dug around, my thoughts turned back to Obaasama and what happened last night. Rude. Awful. Liar. I blinked back tears. No, I’m not, I thought. I am not those things. I was tired, though. Tired of thinking and studying and making people mad. For right now, all I wanted was to forget everything and find more potatoes. My fingernail scraped against something hard. I pulled it out. Another potato! Hmm . . . maybe there were more.

  A girl I hadn’t talked with much before had the three plants next to mine. She was an outer member of Midori’s guruupu, maybe more of a central one now since I left, although I wasn’t quite certain since I’d stopped caring and paying them much attention. I did know they weren’t very nice to her, possibly because her face was covered in a scaly rash. Mean girls, that’s what they were. I plunged my hand into the warm dirt.

  The girl stopped digging and sat back on her heels. “So Waka-chan . . . in America, did your friends talk about boys much?”

  Boys? My friends’ most recent letters described how Jenny B. asked Eric if he’d “go” with her and he responded with “undecided” and how that sent them into a tizzy. Because was that “undecided” in a good way, or “undecided” in a bad way? I felt weird after reading that letter. Eric ticked me off or annoyed the heck out of me most of the time, but I also didn’t like the thought of my friends liking him either. Since he was my jerk, you know . . .

  My fingernail scraped against something hard. Another potato!

  “Nah,” I responded to my fellow potato-digger. The whole Eric backstory was all too hard to explain. Even in English, let alone in Japanese. I dug deeper, sifting through the roots and dirt. Holy moly, three more potatoes!

  “Because there’s someone, you know, who I like.”

  “Really?” My interest was piqued. “Who?” The girls in Japan were a lot less boy-crazy than the girls back home. Last year in sixth grade, there were already kids who’d held hands at recess, and rumors about some girls and boys who did stuff with each other in some park. My mind raced as I tried to figure out which one of the bozos in our class she could possibly have any interest in.

  At that moment, a tanned, athletic boy who always wore tank tops got up from his potato plants and stretched.

  The girl next to me called out to him, “Wow, you sure found a lot!”

  The boy turned our way. “You found all those from one plant?”

  The girl nudged me. “He means you.”

  My pile of potatoes had grown into a small hill. I shrugged. “I guess.”

  I continued to dig. Another potato! It was amazing—the potatoes weren’t just where the plant was. I found more and more a couple feet from where I found the first ones. The more I looked, the more potatoes there were.

  “Wow!” He dropped to his knees and dug around his plants some more.

  The girl’s jaw dropped. “He talked to you! You’re so lucky. He’s the cutest boy in the class, don’t you think?”

  Cute? NO way. He was one of the boys who teased me about “Kasu-RI no mon-PEH” so I found him more obnoxious than anything else. Sure, he wasn’t a pig-faced jerk like Suzuki-kun, or a mean-eyed dummy like Ito-kun, but still. Even if I did think he was cute (which I didn’t), I had two more potato plants to harvest potatoes from.

  She sighed. “I wish he talked to me about my potatoes.” She barely had any potatoes. I thought about suggesting she dig more instead of talking so much, but I stopped myself. That would be mean. I guess I could be mean sometimes too.

  “You want some of mine?” I unearthed six more.

  “Oh! I couldn’t,” she answered, surprised. “But thank you.” She moved away then, trying to chat and gossip with Midori and Yamashita-san as they flipped their hair and ignored her.

  I watched her go and felt sad for her, but also about my old friend Midori-chan—sad because I didn’t know why she hardly ever smiled, or why she turned into the type of girl who had to bring other people down to make herself feel better. What happened to our friendship made me unhappy. It never occurred to me until now that maybe she was unhappy too.

  I was also sad wondering why Obaasama acted like she liked me one day and then all of a sudden not at all. I dug, searching for potatoes at the same time I searched for what I needed to do to survive these last few weeks. I’ll be the perfect child, I thought. I’ll be polite and work hard. I’ll never step over Obaasama with my dirty feet. Most importantly, I will put my guard up and never let anyone hurt me again. With each potato I found, I buried my feelings too.

  I dug some more. Potato, potato, potato, potato . . . potato!

  After we finished harvesting, we loaded our potatoes into bags to take back to our houses.

  “Waka-chan, are you sure you can carry that?” Mr. Adachi asked.

  “Daijoubu.” I responded that I’d be fine.

  When I met Reiko at the gate, she burst out laughing and asked the same thing as Mr. Adachi. “Waka-chan, moteru ka na?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?” I panted as I set down the bag of potatoes.

  “Let me know when you need help,” grinned Reiko.

  “I’ll be fine!” I insisted.

  After about two hundred meters, I needed help.

  Reiko and I took turns carrying the potatoes all the way back to Obaasama’s house.

  As we approached Reiko’s home and Obaasama’s house, Reiko asked if I wanted to come over and study. I wanted to more than anything because I worried what sort of land mines awaited me inside Obaasama’s house. But I knew there was no way I could.

  “I’m too gross to.” Covered in dirt from the potato patch and sweat from hauling them from school, I had an excuse that certainly wasn’t a lie.

  “We’re not worried about that,” smiled Reiko. “But I understand.” We waved goodbye and I went inside.

  “Tadaima,” I announced my return. No answer. I let out a sigh of relief. Better to be alone than in the cold presence of someone who called you names you didn’t deserve.

  I took out all the potatoes and washed them, one by one. Then I scrubbed my face, took out my textbooks and studied. I read over the lesson in my language arts text. Then I took out the kanji I needed to learn for the chapter and wrote each one ten times. I looked up with a start when I noticed Obaasama in front of me.

  “Didn’t you hear me come in?”

  I closed my textbook and sat up straighter. “I didn’t . . . I’m sorry.” I cringed inside when I apologized. I wasn’t the one who needed to.

  “Where did those potatoes come from?”

  “From a school field trip. I dug them up.”

  “All of them?”

  I paused before I answered. Yes, I dug up all of them. Would she call me a liar if I told her that? I didn’t care, because I wasn’t. I nodded.

  “How did you get them back here?”

  “I carried them.”

  “From school?”

  What point did Obaasama want to make with all these questions?

  “Yes, from school.” I tried to keep my irritation from my voice. I was still mad about being locked out.

  “By yourself?”

  “No.” I gathered my books and pencil off the dining room table. “Reiko helped me.”

  “So you two girls carried that mountain of potatoes home from school without any other help.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.” I got up from the table. “She’s a good person.”

  “Ara maa” was all Obaasama could say. Well, I’ll be!

  I didn’t know if she meant that to be an apology or something, but it wasn’t.

  “If you would excuse me, I am rather exhausted,” I resp
onded. “I think I’ll just take a bath and get ready for bed.” I got up and walked into the bedroom and pretended I didn’t notice the sad look pass over her face.

  Twenty-Four

  I woke up to the sound of running water.

  Even though it was Sunday, my aunt and uncle couldn’t take me to Mass today, so I slept in. Turned out I really was exhausted from the day at the potato patch.

  I headed toward the kitchen, toward the sound of the water.

  There, Obaasama stood, peeling the potatoes under the kitchen faucet.

  “Ah, ohayou gozaimasu,” she greeted me. “These are quality potatoes.”

  Still groggy, I grunted a reply. Then, I noticed the bright red socks I’d given her on her feet. I didn’t say anything about them, but Obaasama responded as if I had.

  “Last night, I worried something would happen with my heart since my feet were so cold. But these socks are so warm! Like you said they would be.”

  I nodded. I was no doctor, but I was pretty sure socks couldn’t prevent a heart attack. I held my tongue, though. Didn’t want to be called rude and awful again. Her tone was strangely cheerful, and she talked with me like she did toward the end of summer break, like our fight never happened. She obviously wanted to pretend it hadn’t, but no way was I going to. I deserved an apology.

  “The potatoes in Hokkaido are delicious, you know,” Obaasama continued. “That’s where I grew up.”

  I didn’t care about hearing any more stories, and Obaasama peeled potatoes in a weird way so I had something to change the subject. She kept the faucet on and scritched and scraped the potato’s skin off with her knife under the water. It seemed really inefficient.

  “Do you have a vegetable peeler?” I could have peeled three potatoes in the time it took her to peel one.

  “A what?”

  “A vegetable peeler. You know.” I acted out how I’d peel a potato with one. “To peel carrots, potatoes. You know, a peeler.”

  Obaasama shook her head. “Never heard of it. I don’t need one. This works just fine.”

  Scritch, scritch, scritch.

  “I wasn’t much older than you,” she started again, not taking my hint I wasn’t in the mood to hear more about her past, “when I left home. I was only fifteen when I decided to run away.”