by Sarah Bird
Mama-san bows several times and speaks in what I take to be rapid-fire Japanese. I bow back and put my hand out to shake hers. Laughing behind her left hand, she extends her right and shakes mine, acting as if this were the most outrageous act of her life. Still laughing, Mama-san goes to the carport and comes back out pushing a hand mower.
Mama-san follows the mower in a straight line down the steep hill, her ropy arms straining to keep the ancient machine from breaking away. The smell of cut grass fills the air with a fragrance like watermelon. At the bottom of the hill, she turns and pushes the mower back up the hill, cutting a strip of grass exactly next to the first.
“Moe tried to tell her that the twins would cut our grass, but she just kept coming anyway. The albino boys’ parents told Moe she came with the house.”
“Just like Fumiko.” The words slip out.
“Fumiko who held me even before you did?”
I nod and am about to tell her more when I see what I have been waiting for. Kit goes inside. I rush to follow her. The house seems dark and quiet after being outside.
“Kit, I need to talk to you.”
“I gotta get this gunk off.” Kit waves her hand at her oil-slicked midriff and starts to leave.
“Kit, wait.” She doesn’t turn to face me, but her shoulders sag with exasperation. “What’s going on around here?”
“What do you mean?”
I point to the cereal bowls, the general chaos. “This?” I gesture toward our parents’ room. “Moe?”
“What about Moe?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“How should I know? You’re the one she likes.”
“Look, this place is a wreck. It’s”—I am stunned when I locate the starburst clock that usually hangs above the television propped up on top of the set and discover the time—“… after three in the afternoon and she’s still in bed! I have no idea where the twins are—”
“The lapidary shop. They buy opals and settings cut rate from Dependent Services, make jewelry, and sell it at the Officers’ Club pool for a big profit.”
“Oh, great. Does Dad know about this?”
Kit shrugs and makes a face reminiscent of a cow chewing its cud. In that one expression is communicated an entire lifetime of dismissal, and in spite of my resolution not to let Kit get to me, she does. A sound like rushing water fills my head. “What did I ever do to make you hate me so much?”
Kit glares into my face. Her eyes, usually a swimming-pool aqua, redden until the irises look yellow.
The phone rings and, even as we glower at each other, Kit picks up the receiver and answers the way we have been trained to answer since we started talking: “Root residence. Kit speaking.” The call is obviously for her. She turns away and purrs, “Mikey,” making the name into a two-syllable seduction. This ability to shift from snarling rage to honey-tongued coquetry has always baffled me. I could never figure out which was real, the rage or the honey.
“Just a min, Mikey.” She covers the receiver, turns, and pops her eyes at me to ask why I’m still standing there.
I shake my head to stop the roaring. “Look, could we just declare a truce? I’m only going to be here a few weeks.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be gone most of the time anyway.”
“The all-expense-paid trip to Tokyo?”
“God. Bosco. It’s like living with a fucking parrot.”
“Uh, you want to help me clean up a little?”
“Fuck that. What do you think I’ve been doing for the last year here in paradise? Just because Moe refuses to have a maid doesn’t mean I’m going to become the house slave.”
“Moe refuses to have a maid?”
“Everyone else here does, but she won’t allow it.”
“Why?”
Kit rolls her eyes and gasps with exasperation. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“Obviously because of what happened last time.”
“What?”
“You’re the brain. Figure it out.” Kit turns her back to me, picks up the phone, and walks out to the kitchen as far as the cord will go.
My head throbs and I have to breathe through my mouth until my heart stops pounding. Outside, Mama-san incises a neat strip of pale chartreuse straight up the green hill.
Jungle Gardenia
At three the next morning, I sit up in bed, wide awake. Lucky is chirp-burping softly. Bosco snuffles in her sleep. She’s supposed to take Actifed for her allergies before she goes to sleep but usually forgets. Traces of iridescent makeup left over from her date the night before give Kit’s tanned face a phosphorescent glow. Even when she is sleeping, her beauty and hostility radiate dangerously. Suddenly, the little room is too hot in spite of the chilled air blowing in. I throw the covers off and leave.
Out on the back patio, Moe reads a thick hardcover book by the dim yellow light cast by a bug bulb. She stubs out a Kool in an ashtray already crowded with butts and looks up when I slide the door open.
“So, your clock’s not reset yet?” she asks, as I scrape a web-strapped lawn chair across the concrete and sit down next to her.
“I guess not.”
A constant ocean breeze sweeps up the long hill, cooling off the humid night. I pull my knees up to hug them to my chest and cover them with the stretchy expanse of my nightie.
My mother lights another Kool. “My clock never has really reset.”
“You’ve been here a year.”
“Is that all? It seems like ten. So, tell me about college.”
“Oh, you know, big rooms filled with sullen young people napping and doodling.”
“You sassy brat. Did you make many new friends?”
I hate the strain in Moe’s voice as she tries to sound casual, as if the subject of Bernie having no friends has never come up before.
“ ‘Make any new friends?’ You mean, like, construct them in biology lab?”
“Hah-hah.”
“Oh, okay, friends. God, Moe, the tiaras I collected. I had to leave most of them in storage. Jeez, it got embarrassing. They were always electing me queen of something or other.”
The air-conditioner compressor cuts off, and in the silence the deep bass hum of a jet engine thrums.
“So, no friends,” Moe concludes.
“Nary a one. They said it was a record for an incoming freshman to make it through an entire year without speaking to anyone except the ladies at the cafeteria line. Got some great tips on hair nets.”
“What about your roommate? Surely you had to speak to her.”
“Ditched out on me the first week. My personal charisma was so intense that she told the Dean of Women she was pregnant to get out of her contract and moved in with her boyfriend. Had the place to myself the whole year. Thank God. No outsiders.”
Moe heaves a big sigh that signals she is worrying about me being a pariah.
“Face it, Moe, you are breeding a race of social misfits unlike any the world has ever seen. Except Kit, of course.”
A second later, she issues her all-purpose benediction. “Ah, well, machts nichts, eh, bebby? We’ll always have each other.”
On the distant runway, a jet takes off. The bawl of its engines rises to a higher and higher whine until the red taillights disappear in the dark sky.
“C-one-forty-one.” Moe points the orange dot of her cigarette toward the departing plane. “They take off and land all night long. Cargo planes going to Vietnam.”
A minute or two later, another plane takes off.
“B-fifty-two. Can you hear the difference?”
I shake my head no. “They sound the same to me.”
Moe holds up a finger and tilts her head as if listening to a celestial symphony. “No, no. A different timbre. More bass in the one-forty-one.” Moe reaches behind her and flips off the bug light. The darkness is a relief.
I listen to Moe’s long exhalations and wonder if she is staring at me, studying my face and wo
rrying about me the way she usually does. Then my eyes adjust to the darkness and I see that she’s not looking at me at all. In fact, she seems so unaware of my presence that it takes my breath away, like peering into the one mirror that ever reliably reflected me back and seeing nothing. I wish she’d go back to worrying about me having no friends. I don’t expect to lead singsongs for my nurse pals or anything, but she could give me some advice for making contact with humans whose last name isn’t Root. But I seem to be the last thing on my mother’s mind.
“A plane takes off every three minutes. Do you realize how much fuel that is? A million gallons every day. A million.” Her voice sounds overwhelmed, defeated, as if she were telling me how much water washes up onshore each day, letting the number alone show us both how little anyone can do to change it.
“Moe, what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Her question is an answer that asks, What’s right? For a long time neither of us speaks. Then Moe lets out a long sigh. “God, what I wouldn’t give for a fresh strawberry. You come to a tropical island, you think they’d at least have decent fruit. Have you seen the produce at the commissary? Some mingy cold-storage apples. Pears hard as hand grenades. Strawberries. A big, juicy strawberry. I smell them in my dreams.”
The burned menthol scent of her Kool fills the air.
“I thought you quit. You quit in Mountain Home. You were a bitch for months.”
“Mosquitoes. I had to start again. And I don’t like that language.”
“Had to?” I am peevish, impatient with my mother for not doing her job.
“Do you remember how you and Kit used to beg me to do this?” she asks, tracing the glowing coal of her cigarette through the night, making designs in the dark, as she spells out my name the way she would do after stories were read and the lights turned out. But it was me; I was the one who always begged her to “make designs.” Moe would only have to spin out the loops of Kit’s name once or twice before she was sound asleep. But I, fearing the moment when she would leave, kept begging for more words, for starbursts and loop-de-loops and roller coasters to slice the dark into safe patterns. If I was lucky and the twins didn’t cry, Moe would stay and tell another piece of the long story she started telling me before I could remember.
Her Kool glows in the dark. She stops and holds the burning butt out as if she was trying to figure out what it is. “Damn those Tunisian mosquitoes.”
In spite of myself, I snuggle into the lawn chair. I love this part of the story, How World War II Made Me Start Smoking.
“What Tunisian mosquitoes?” I prompt.
“Little tiny ones. Couldn’t see them, but, God, they were deadly. We had movies every Thursday night. A couple of the corpsmen would back a troop truck around and tack up a bed-sheet across the back, and that’s where they’d show the movie. I think it was the projector light that drew those mosquitoes in from off the desert. Plus the feast we were laying out for them. Big bunch of fat, juicy American nurses.
“Either that or Minnie Kravitz’s perfume. I don’t know how she managed it, but Minnie had a steady supply of Jungle Gardenia through the entire war. We banned her from wearing it on the troopship going over. But the longer we were over there, the more I came to love that Jungle Gardenia. Anything that didn’t smell like carbolic acid, or Pine-Sol, or men.”
Moe sucks on her cigarette and I fill in the other World War II smells she has described before. The sweet rotting-fruit odor of gas gangrene. The loamy, mushroomy scent of a wound about to go septic. The acrid burnt-metal smell of a bone saw cutting through a femur.
“Jungle Gardenia.” She concludes her reverie. “Came to love that Jungle Gardenia. But if I sat anywhere near Minnie, I’d have to have a smoker on the right side and a smoker on the left or I’d get eaten alive. So I just gave up and started myself. For years after the war, a movie didn’t look right to me without a haze of cigarette smoke twining up through it. Bogie’d be up there smoking on-screen and we’d all be puffing our lungs out right along with him. Smoking then was good for your health, I promise you! Kept those damned Tunisian mosquitoes away. The ward I worked on was filled with boys, young boys, shipped back with malaria or, worse, dengue fever that they’d gotten from those damn mosquitoes. Bonebreak fever, we called it, because those poor guys’d seize up so badly they literally broke bones.
“I remember walking up to the ward on the third floor, and you could hear them before you reached the second. It sounded like they were jumping on pogo sticks up there. When the fever got really bad, those poor guys’d thrash around on those metal cots until they got them jumping around the floor. Hilda Heinz was the charge nurse on Three. Big farm girl from Wisconsin. She fell in love with a major, Howard Patterson, who neglected to tell her he was married. Broke Hilda’s heart. She came from a family of thirteen kids and wanted a baby more than anyone I ever knew. Never married after Howard. The corpsmen called her Brunhilda. Big girl. She could lift a patient out of bed like he was a baby. But old Hilda, boy, she always had a joke for you. When the patients thrashed around like that she’d tell me when I checked in, ‘They’re off to the races again tonight, Moe.’ ”
Moe laughs. It’s the first time she’s truly sounded like herself since I arrived.
“You had to laugh, or you’d never stop crying. All those boys. Most of them younger than us, and us barely twenty. Babies, really. Scared, crying for their mothers or out of their minds with fever. I’d hear the beds bouncing as I started up to the second floor, and if I was really tired the tears’d just jump into my eyes. But that Brunhilda, boy.” Moe makes the clucking sound at the side of her mouth that is her ultimate gesture of admiration. “She could always put the old snap back in your garters. I’d hit the third floor and there she’d be, her blond hair all braided up and wound around her head, and she’d say something to make me laugh, like, ‘Well, they’re off to the races again tonight, Moe.’ Those beds jumping around like drops of water on a hot griddle, that’d just be the way it was and we were all in it together. Then she’d tell me to put Posey restraints on bed fifteen and I’d be surprised, because fifteen was a skinny kid from Erie, Pennsylvania, who looked like a plucked chicken, who’d said an entire rosary while he was delirious, and he was so worn out from the fever he didn’t have the energy to thrash much anymore.
“So I’d go over with the sheets you needed to tie a patient in with, to do the Posey restraints, and the skinny kid from Erie’s gone and a new skinny kid is in his bed and the fever would be new and fresh in him and he’d have that bed bouncing like you wouldn’t believe. That was when, every time, you’d have to make a choice. Do you cry for the skinny kid who’s gone or try to smile for the new kid? Maybe I couldn’t always smile, but I’d look over at Brunhilda and we’d both sort of shake our heads like we were mothers watching our wild kids on the playground, and Brunhilda’d say something like, ‘Musta had Mexican jumping beans for supper.’ Oh, she was a sassy one, that Brunhilda.” Another cluck of admiration, silence, and then: “So you start smoking in self-defense. The mosquitoes. Everything. What choice did you have?”
The silence stretches out until I ask, “What are you reading?”
She holds up the book. In the darkness I can make out that it has a big Star of David on the front. “Judaism has always fascinated me. There were lots of Jews in my unit, and I always admired them. I’m thinking about converting.”
“Converting? Now? After you’ve turned six children over to the Whore of Babylon?”
“Don’t use that kind of language to describe Holy Mother Church.”
“That’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses call Holy Mother Church.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t allow blood transfusions either.”
“I think that’s some other wacko group, unlike us enlightened Catholics, who believe in virgin birth and old guys in big hats never being wrong.”
“Bernadette Marie Root, you are a sassy brat.” I earn a cluck of admiration.
“So, you’re
going to convert?”
“The Jews, they just understand suffering so well.”
I sense the old snap starting to sag. “Moe, look at us Catholics. We have such a keen appreciation of suffering we’ve taken up big chunks of the past two thousand years inflicting it upon most of the known world.”
“Catholics aren’t responsible for all the evils of the world.”
“Oh, yeah, right, I forgot about the Mongol invasions.”
Moe closes the book and puts it down on the patio. “Oh, well. Just a thought.” She has that unstrung sound in her voice again. I pick the book back up and put it on her lap.
“Moe, no, I’m only kidding. Be a Jew.” Desperate not to have her slump back into the stunned stranger who’d met me at the airport, I sing, “Be a Jew!” doing a really bad Ethel Merman, finishing with “Everything’s Coming up Moses.” Anything to put the old snap back in her garters.
But Moe doesn’t seem to hear me. She takes a long drag on her cigarette. The glow is not as bright as it had been, and I realize dawn is coming.
In the house, I hear my father in the kitchen. He says he likes to go into work really early to get “a jump” on the day, but it seems like he simply prefers living in a different time zone from us, from his family, which is why he goes to bed to read at seven-thirty every night and leaves before dawn. I hear each noise of his familiar morning ritual in my head before he makes it. A cup of orange juice pouring into the blender. The rip of the three Knox gelatin envelopes he empties into the juice. The crack of the aluminum ice cube tray as he lifts the lever, freeing the cubes. The clatter of the blender as the ice cubes batter against the blades. The subsiding moan when the blender is turned off. A creak as the lid of the hi-fi is lifted. A clunk when the record album is released.
In the predawn light, I catch Moe’s glance and we wait for …
“¿Cuánto cuesta una tarjeta postal para los Estados Unidos?” an ultra-suave Latino voice asks.
“So Dad and Ricardo Montalban are still dating,” I say, and win the big prize. Moe puts her hand over her mouth and stifles a laugh.
