by Sarah Bird
“Knock me down, why don’t you?” she calls after her little brother, before turning to me, holding out a pair of red lacquered chopsticks inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Look what I found.”
“You shouldn’t be using those.”
“Why?” Bosco pokes them into the do she has created for me.
The year out of the self-contained system of my family loosens my tongue enough for me to say the name that hasn’t been mentioned since we left Japan. “Fumiko gave them to Mom.”
“Who’s Fumiko?”
That question opens a vault containing all the other questions I haven’t asked for the past eight years. Eight years when a child’s memories faded and were replaced by unspoken family credos. “She lived with our family for four years. She was the first person who held you when you came home from the hospital.”
“Before you?”
“Before me.”
“She did not live with our family for four years or there would be pictures of her in the trunk.”
Because she always is, I accept that Bosco is right about there being no photos of Fumiko in the trunk. It’s been years since I pawed through the trunk full of photos that Moe intends, one day, to put in albums. But I know that at one time there were photos of Fumiko. I remember Girls’ Day when I was nine, smiling into Moe’s Brownie box camera, Fumiko and I wearing matching pink kimonos with yellow chrysanthemums, holding the chalk-faced doll Fumiko had given me. I remember another photo of Fumiko. Black and white. Fumiko is wearing the gray mouton coat Moe gave her, standing outside in the snow, holding Buzz in one arm, Abner in the other.
Bosco stops brushing my hair and leans close to my ear. “I know a secret about Kit. Want me to tell?”
I hold my breath and am certain that Kit’s secret is that she is pregnant.
“She’s going to enter a dance contest and win an all-expenses-paid trip to Tokyo.”
Now I wish that something even worse than pregnancy was happening to Kit. Dancing is my one thing. Moe assigned it to me back in the days when she and I and Fumiko used to clean the house together, singing and dancing to albums. “Bernadette Root,” she’d told me, “you’ve got rhythm. You are going to be our family’s dancer.” And though my most constant partner had always been the mirror in the girls’ room, I was good. I couldn’t sing. Never really got the knack for making friends. My thighs are heavy, lips thin, hair lank. But dancing, dancing is mine.
Bosco checks her watch and drops the brush on Kit’s vanity. “Hurry up! Put your swimsuit on. You’ll miss it. Bring shampoo,” she orders, running out of our room.
The disc jockey’s voice seems louder in the sudden silence that follows Bosco’s exit.
That was the Chairman of the Board’s daughter Nancy, with “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” here on Armed Forces Radio, the voice of the Keystone of the Pacific.
It is a shock to hear a straight disc jockey after a year of listening to the stoned cynics on FM radio who could barely be bothered to tell you the title of the last Hendrix or Doors cut they just played, though they might go on at length about how very, very trippy the selection was for them. The hyperkinetic Armed Forces Radio voice comes from the very near yet irretrievably lost past. It is a past that lives on, here on Okinawa, the keystone of the Pacific.
Run for cover! the disc jockey advises in his jokey Casey Kasem voice. Cuz them raindrops are gonna be a-fallin’ on yo’ head!
As B. J. Thomas croons that he has just done him some talking to the sun, Okinawa begins to seem like a Twilight Zone episode with all the massed forces of the military combined to maintain the illusion that the America I just left has not changed forever. That the country everyone on this tiny island has been sent to defend is still back there, everyone listening to the same happy tunes. I snap the radio off the instant the Fifth Dimension begins crooning “Up, Up and Away.”
The eight-inch-thick poured concrete walls and typhoon-proof windows give the house a dead, airless feel. In the hall, on the floor beneath the spots where, I guess, Moe wants to hang them, is the set of three framed fans that have hung on the wall in the hallways of all the houses we lived in since Fussa.
I pass by the closed door to my parents’ room and assume that Moe has taken the station wagon to the commissary. I imagine her return and the familiar ritual of unloading several dozen brown paper bags containing multiple bags of Oreos, blocks of frozen peas, planks of frozen steaks. A crate of frozen orange juice. A pallet of milk.
At the door to the boys’ room, I stop, stunned by the disorder. For all the years of my growing-up, the boys’ room under Moe’s strict guidance had been a miniature barracks, with beds made the instant they were evacuated, sheets and blankets tucked in under the mattresses so that the entire waxed and gleaming clean bare floor was visible. I now behold a hobo’s camp of dirty pants, socks, underwear, hand grips, barbells, jump ropes, Boy Scout manuals, books by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury, various hand tools, a clarinet, a bolt cutter, a snorkeling mask, three swim fins, the remnants of a Lego tower, and wrappers from Slo-Pokes, Sugar Daddies, Chicken Bones, and Pixie Sticks. Above this disaster, the twins have suspended their model airplanes from the ceiling with clear fishing lines. The collection includes the planes our father once flew. The B-17 soars upward. A B-25 bears down on it. An RB-50 flies above them all, doing reconnaissance.
The living room looks like my brothers had a slumber party for a platoon of derelict scouts. Clothes, pillows, sheets are strewn about amid old copies of Stars and Stripes. Several chairs are overturned and covered with blankets to make a fort. Used cereal bowls are shellacked to the coffee table in a ring around several open boxes of Cap’n Crunch. Packing boxes, still taped shut, are stacked in the corners of the room. I read the labels: “Camel Saddle,” “Geisha Doll,” “Fork & Spoon.”
The kitchen is worse. Cockroaches scuttle in and out of an open garbage can. Dishes are heaped in the sink. The refrigerator door is open. Two half gallons of milk and a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid sweat next to several curling slices of bologna and an open jar of mayonnaise. The only other item is a large plastic bag filled with damp khaki uniforms kept refrigerated so they won’t mildew before Moe has a chance to iron them. I throw everything out except the uniforms and close the door.
On the front of the refrigerator a duty roster is attached by a couple of shell-people magnets. It has FEBRUARY written on the top. There are only a few sporadic checks on it. My father started posting duty rosters eight years ago when we left Japan and reentered an economy that did not subsidize domestic help for Air Force captains. Each month he would sit at the old Underwood typewriter he’d once used to type papers on when he was a philosophy major at the University of Michigan and divvy up KP. Most of the assignments were framed in terms of policing.
Bernadette: Police latrine.
Eileen: Police kitchen.
Bryan and Francis: Police trash.
Our father always uses our real names as if use of our nicknames signifies entry into a club he doesn’t want to join.
I stare at this duty roster, four months out of date, the wreckage of the kitchen, and Donna Ingram comes to mind.
Donna Ingram got her family RIF’d. Her family lived at the end of the block on Mercury Drive on Kirtland Air Force Base. Her brothers let the lawn grow into a field of dandelions. The wash on the back line stayed out through several downpours and a dust storm until the undershirts and panties dried into stiff, gray disks. Their dog, Mr. Sniffer, ran loose until Mrs. Detwiler, the president of the Officers’ Wives Club, found him in her backyard locked up with her bichon frise, Snowball. Then, when Colonel Detwiler dragged Mr. Sniffer on a rope back to the Ingrams, he discovered that Donna hadn’t been doing the dishes and had left her mother’s Harvey Wallbanger glasses all over the house.
One day Donna Ingram was sitting next to me coloring in the route Vasco da Gama discovered to the New World, and the next she was gone, RIF’d. RIF’d was one of those terms like “reconna
issance” that we knew for years before finding out their meaning. We always knew that reconnaissance meant something you weren’t even allowed to ask about, and we knew that RIF meant your father lost his job because of a bad family. Learning later that the letters stood for Reduction in Force added little to our elemental understanding that if the lawn wasn’t mowed every week the life we knew would end in the time it took the Housing Officer to report our transgression. I think of Moe’s blank expression and, for the first time, realize that the Harvey Wallbangers must have had a lot more to do with Donna’s disappearance than the glasses they were served in not being washed.
I run to the kitchen window. As I try to calculate if the occupants of the house across the street can see the mess, I notice that Frenchie, the Oldsmobile station wagon, is parked in the carport, which means that Moe is not up and not at the commissary. I jerk the curtains closed and hurry back to my parents’ room.
Moe is asleep on the four-poster mahogany bed they bought in Japan. Her mouth is open slightly and her head tilts back into the pillow as if she were about to do a back bend. A stripe of gray on either side of her part pushes away the rest of the hair that is dyed chestnut. Aside from three miscarriages, I can’t ever recall seeing my mother in bed. Not during the day. She was always up before anyone except my father. Always out in the kitchen flipping pancakes or spooning pablum into a baby in the high chair or chopping cylinders of frozen orange juice into cubes so they would melt faster in a pitcher of water. Then she would stay up late at night dyeing coconut green for an Easter cake or sewing a costume for one of Kit’s tryouts or courts or squads.
I think about the sheer draft-horse labor of raising six children. Of simply keeping eight people fed. I try to remember when Moe stopped singing through it all, and my head fills with the songs she did sing back in Japan when Fumiko helped her carry the load. And the wayward wind is a restless wind.… I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.… And the one Fumiko loved. The one she would shyly ask “my dam” to sing as they mopped or dusted or vacuumed side by side. Somewhere over the rainbow …
“Come on, you’ll miss it.” Bob pulls on my hand, tugging me outside, away from my mother’s door.
In the backyard, I take my first good look at the island. Our house is one in a line of identical reinforced concrete boxes built on top of a high hill that might have been drawn by Dr. Seuss. A far-off ravine at the base of the hill, clotted with a tangle of vines and low-growing jungle vegetation, separates the houses from the rest of Kadena Air Base sweeping out below. I recognize, in the distance, the comfortingly familiar bulk of a commissary, the BX, the endless stretches of runway sweeping out to the sea.
“See that big bare spot over there.” Bosco points to a distant hill. I squint and can see that it is honeycombed with craters and mostly gray beneath patchy vegetation. “That got bombed out during the Battle of Okinawa. There’s still so many chemicals from bombs that nothing can grow. One time a kid blew off his leg because there was a mine that hadn’t exploded. The Battle of Okinawa was the most costly naval battle of the war in the Pacific.” Bosco’s voice takes on the droning quality it does when she reads the pages that appear in her mind.
“More than twelve thousand American and one hundred ten thousand Japanese and Okinawan soldiers lost their lives, along with seventy-five thousand civilians, many of whom committed suicide.” In her normal voice, Bosco explains, “I did my Geography book report on Okinawa. Mom says it’s stupid to come halfway around the world and then do your Geography book report on Switzerland.”
“Mom’s right.”
The thump-thump-thump of a helicopter’s rotors catches my attention. It hovers above our house close enough that I can see the dog tags swinging around the necks of the three Marines leaning out the open doors on the side.
“They’re from Camp Hansen,” Bosco explains. “They’re here for her.”
I follow Bosco’s finger to the roof. Kit perches on a towel on the flat pebbled roof, rubbing baby oil with globules of iodine floating in it on the inside of her thighs.
“Christina Kelso’s mother says that Kit is just a big P.R.I.C.K. tease and that she’s going to get into more trouble than she bargained for if she doesn’t cool her jets and that the only reason Kit got head cheerleader at Kubasaki instead of Christina’s sister is that Kit showed everything at tryouts, and anytime you waggle that in front of any male they’ll go crazy and it’ll look like someone’s popular when it’s really just the testosterone talking and Moe should do something about her before it gets any more out of hand or Daddy’ll end up getting RIF’d.” Bosco gulps in a big breath.
“Gosh, Christina’s mother must not have much to worry about.”
“Nobody does. Not here. Mom says that’s the problem. That’s exactly why she hates living on-base, and it’s ten times worse here than any other place we’ve ever lived, and the officers’ wives are the cattiest bunch of bitches she’s ever seen, and the less we have to do with any of them the better. That’s why she hates it so much and never gets up. She sleeps all day and Dad goes to his Community Liaison Officer job and says a monkey with a pencil stuck up his ass could do it—but what is it? What does he do that a monkey with a pencil stuck up his ass could do?”
I’m so unused to questions about what our father does that I just stare at Bosco. It had been odd in the dorm during my year as a civilian to meet new people and have them ask what my father did. To overhear them talking about their fathers being lawyers, CPAs, store managers, art teachers, construction foremen. No one on any of the bases where we’d grown up had ever asked me what my father did. The question wasn’t needed; the answer that I gave to the girls in the dorm—“He’s in the Air Force”—was the very ground all dependent lives were built on.
“Kit! Kit!” the boys in the helicopter yell. “Take off your top!”
Up on the roof, my sister shoots them the bird and the three Marines hoot and slug each other. Pebbles from the roof skitter down on us when Kit rolls over. I wish I had a gun. I’d have fired off a few rounds at the helicopter jerks when they started making humping motions in the direction of my sister’s backside.
“Can you stop her, Bernie? She’s gonna get us RIF’d.” Behind her glasses, tears pool in Bosco’s eyes.
I am about to scream for Kit to get down when a solid wall of gray clouds rolls in. Like turning on a faucet, the clouds pour rain as evenly on runways, highways, bombed-out hillsides, and parking lots as they do on the mat of green fighting to reclaim the island. Kit stands on the roof in the sudden downpour and wraps the towel she was lying on around herself like a sarong. The rain makes it hard for the helicopter to hover above our roof, and it lifts and peels away.
Bosco and Bob stand beneath a spout that drains the roof and rain waterfalls over them. Bosco has on a two-piece suit made of stretchy navy material with a band of lime green where her waist will be one day.
Kit drops onto the top of the air-conditioner compressor and takes up a spot at the rain spout on the other end of the house.
“Hurry! Hurry!” Bosco waves me over and I crowd under the stream with her and Bob. The water that pours onto me is a substance I’ve never experienced before, so pure it tingles on my skin. I open my mouth and rivulets stream in, sweet and clean. Bosco hands me her bottle of Herbal Essence. I squirt on the piney-smelling stuff, close my eyes, and suds up. When I open my eyes again, three identical redheaded boys of only slightly varying heights stare at me. They are so pale that albinism seems a possibility.
Bob steps up to the tallest one. “I told you my big sister was coming from Alvinturkey.”
The boys gape at me.
“Do you live around here?” I ask.
The tallest one points to the house across the street.
“Oh.” I smile to show my benign intent to this tiny tribe.
Bosco glances up at the sky and orders me, “Finish quick.”
I rinse the shampoo out of my hair, and a minute later the last of the gray clo
uds rolls away, the faucet of rain is turned off, and the sun explodes, hotter than ever.
The three little boys look at one another with alarm, then run single-file up the hill to their house.
“They’re not allowed to be out in the sun,” Bob explains. “They can die.”
“Their father is a butt smoocher of the first water who only made colonel because he’s got his head buried up McClintock’s ass.” Bosco quotes my father so accurately she even duplicates his chopped cadence.
“Who’s McClintock?”
“You mean old Bubble Butt?” I recognize my father’s gift for characterization. “Colonel McClintock is the overseer of this elephant graveyard of military careers. Final resting place for all the deadwood who fail to kiss the right asses and get sent to Command and Staff College. Bubble Butt is not command material. Never was. Never will be. Hasn’t flown since Orville and Wilbur bumped their heinies at Kitty Hawk. He just knew the right butts to smooch, that’s all.” It’s unsettling to hear my sister channel our father so perfectly. “Bubble Butt is part of the whole power elite, the pointy-headed Academy pukes who made Dad a ground pounder.”
It occurs to me that my father lives in a more vivid world than most, where each day is a series of agonistic encounters against a host of enemies, from the pineapple man to Bubble Butt to—I had to admit it—Moe, all bent on his destruction.
“Look! It’s Mama-san!” Bob waves wildly at an Okinawan woman toiling up the steep hill leading to our house on an ancient black bicycle so heavy she must stand on the pedals to inch forward. She reaches our house and springs off.
“Mama-san, ohayo gozaimasu.” Bosco bows.
Mama-san is a garden gnome come to life. Barely taller than Bob, no more than four and a half feet, she is as stringy and weathered as a piece of beef jerky. Though her leathery skin looks at least sixty years old, her brilliant big-toothed smile and matte-black hair permed into a crispy frizz belong to a woman in her twenties—a very fit woman, one who can pump a bicycle made of cast iron up a roller-coaster hill. The toes of her bare feet grip the earth.
