by Sarah Bird
I scoot to the edge of my seat. “Mom, move over. Let me drive.”
“How did we end up here?” I know she is talking about more than being stuck on a crowded street on a tiny Pacific island with a swarm of angry Asian motorists in miniature vehicles bearing down on us.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I say gently. “Scoot over. I’m going to drive.” I lean forward, raising my butt off the vinyl, and Moe slides behind me while I take her place at the wheel.
Moe blows her nose, huffs out several breaths, then laughs. “Take a tip from me, Bern. Don’t have two teenage daughters at the same time you start getting menopausal. It’s just a hormonal disaster waiting to happen.”
The snap is returning to her garters. I get the car started and head toward the Kokusai Hotel.
Brut
“Jew or tickuh?” I stare at the Ryukyuan woman standing at the entrance to the Kokusai Hotel ballroom for a second until I realize that she has asked, “Your ticket?” I hand it to her. She gives me a number.
Moe glances at the number. “Seven. That’s lucky.”
“Yes, I can hardly believe my good fortune.”
Moe tucks her chin into her neck, admonishing me for my snippiness, and we step into the ballroom.
I search the room for Kit but can’t find her in the small knot of girls, their mothers, and friends gathered beside the stage. The walls of the ballroom are stippled with pieces of tape anchoring bits of crepe paper, gold and green, the colors of the Kubasaki Dragons. I imagine the couples from the American high school dancing here at their prom. The shrill scratch of a barely amplified record needle settling into its groove plinks into the ballroom.
Bobby Moses sits regally onstage in an impeccably tailored suit of dark blue sharkskin with the slightest hint of maroon iridescence. His hooded eyes evaluate the contestant, who stands onstage facing him with her back to the audience. She wears a plain black leotard that she outgrew last summer over her pear-shaped body.
The first notes of “Hello Dolly” shrill out of speakers too small for the large room. The girl whirls around and high-steps forward. She heaves the bell of the pear to the right as she kicks out on the first “Dolly,” and Bobby looks down to make a note on the clipboard in his lap.
“Where’s Kit?” Moe asks.
I shrug. Bobby Moses nods and waves Pear Girl off the stage. Next up is a tap dancer in a red-white-and-blue sequined vest and top hat who clacks her way through “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Bobby Moses watches the girl’s shoes intently, as if she might be pounding out an important message in Morse code that he has to translate. When she finishes, he makes another mark on his clipboard and doesn’t look up until the tap dancer stumbles off the stage. Numbers three and four execute jazz-styled numbers that both feature a fair amount of minstrelly hand flapping and the sort of backward tiptoeing generally used to garnish an ice-skating routine.
Number five is a clog dancer done up in a burlesque hillbilly outfit with fake blond braids sticking out from beneath an undersized hat with a giant daisy drooping down over cartoon freckles. She smiles and reveals a blacked-out front tooth. As soon as the fiddles begin to twang, the clogger sets up a powerful counterpoint, banging her feet on the stage until puffs of dust rise all around her. Her knees pivot up and out like pistons beneath layers of petticoats and a short dirndl skirt.
It’s a lively, attention-grabbing routine. I think that, if I were Bobby Moses, it would be a good choice for an intermission act. She stomps to a decisive finale and finishes up on one knee, arm outstretched à la Al Jolson in Bobby Moses’s direction. Bobby nods, studies his clipboard, calls out, “Number six.”
“You should put this on.” Moe hands me my costume.
“Kit Root?” Bobby calls out, when no one takes the stage.
“I’m going to go now,” Moe tells me. “I don’t want to look like I’m cheering for one of you over the other. I’ll wait downstairs in the lobby.” As I take the costume, my heart starts to pound so hard that blood throbs in my ears. Even though I’m still telling myself I won’t go through with it, I’m so nervous after Moe leaves I’m afraid I’m going to throw up.
The quarterback-looking boy who was in the backseat of the convertible the other day runs up to Bobby. “There’s gonna be a short delay while we”—he points to another couple of guys busy hooking up a trunk-sized amplifier to a reel-to-reel tape player—“set up for Kit.” He wears a red-and-white striped shirt and pressed chinos that make him look like one of the Beach Boys.
“Testing. Testing.” The boy speaks into a microphone he’s attached to the big speakers and tells us, “Uh. Hi. I made this tape. It’s, like, a medley or something.” He grins at the group of Kit’s fellow cheerleaders and other members of the Kubasaki High School varsity who’ve come to support Kit. They grin back. “So it’s all stuff that Kit is going to dance to.” The boy pats his flat stomach, then holds his hand out. “So, without further ado, I give you Kit Root!”
Her crowd applauds, the first applause of the afternoon. The other contestants look around, peeved, their expressions asking if clapping and fancy sound systems are allowed, and, if so, why didn’t they get their own clappers and sound systems?
Bobby Moses shrugs.
The clapping dies down, but no music starts. The quarterback squats in front of his huge TEAC setup, clicking knobs so that the big spools of tape squeal and whir one way and then the other. He mumbles something, realizes he can’t be heard, and picks up the microphone again. “Short delay here, folks. We’ll get it started in—” He flips some switches, turns a knob, and the pulsing intro to “Fever” floods out from several sets of speakers suspended by chains from the ceiling, saturating the ballroom.
The quarterback yells into the mike, “Kit Root!” The door to the ladies’ room bursts open and my little sister strides in on a wave of sound, beauty, and supreme confidence. The sew girl’s dress does what it needs to, which is to hide as little of Kit as possible and make all of her look as if she just stepped off the set of Hullabaloo. The thin straps of the shiny lilac sheath rest perfectly on her tan shoulders. The darts are placed at the precise angle to offset the tilt of her breasts. The waist nips in, then out, flowing effortlessly over her curves.
You give me fever.
Peggy Lee’s throbbing voice fades to a whisper and dies away altogether. Whoever made Kit’s tape did a professional job, giving her exactly enough time to take center stage and allow her lilac jewel of a self to possess every inch of the ballroom and make it seem sordid by comparison.
The two jazz dancers gaze at Kit onstage, mesmerized, as she stands utterly still and demonstrates what the word “charisma” means. The clogger and the tapper, however, mutter audibly about unfair advantages and why couldn’t they have gotten to use a good sound system? I envy them their belief that a few pieces of electronic equipment are all that stands between them and the adulation Kit inspires. Having studied it up close for Kit’s entire life, I can promise them that they can buy all the TEAC speakers in the world and they’ll never touch what Kit had from the moment she was born. It is so obvious who is going to win that the clogger and tapper and their mothers stomp out in protest before Kit even dances a step.
These boots are made for walkin’.
Kit breaks into a crisp march dramatizing Nancy Sinatra’s petulant threat to walk right out on you! She slams down the heels of the white boots with each step in a way that makes the silver fringe jump in a startled, unsettling fashion.
Fighting men who jump and die!
Kit segues into a tribute to the Green Berets, saluting each direction of the compass and then marching on. The marching and saluting evolve into an energetic pantomime of skeet shooting for the duration of a brief snatch of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” which climaxes with Kit taking one in the heart and spiraling to a chest-clutching death. Spontaneous applause ripples through the crowd at the dramatic rendering. Bobby Moses remains as unreadable as he’s been throughout.
Kit breaks up the pace by throwing in the preternaturally perky “Sweet Pea.” Holding her hands to her mouth like a megaphone, she lip-syncs Tommy Roe’s plea, Oh, Sweet Pea, come on and dance with me. As Petula Clark warns her darling not to sleep in the subway and Kit acts out both a finger-twitching “no” and sleeping, I begin to suspect that I am either poisonously jealous or mentally ill. I turn and gaze upon a school of rapt faces swimming in delight at my sister’s routine and wonder how so many seemingly normal humans could be enthralled by a performance that I find excruciating in ways only prisoners of war usually get to experience.
And, Honey, I miss you and I’m doing fine.
Kit acts out the tree and how big it’s grown. I hear sniffles behind me and decide that I am poisonously jealous and the world is mentally ill and there is no further reason for me to hang around. Kit does not need one more person to applaud when she is crowned the winner.
A second before I can leave, Bobby Moses catches my attention as he shifts his great bulk and the metal chair creaks beneath his copious buttocks. Far more attention-grabbing, however, is the expression on his face as he watches Kit dramatize Honey’s tragic demise. For a second he studies my sister, his big sumo-wrestler head cocked to one side, his eyebrows rammed together so tightly in puzzlement that welts of fat ripple between them. Bafflement is quickly overtaken by irritation, then outright disgust. It is a panorama of expressions that so exactly matches those I am disguising it’s like looking in a mirror. I take comfort in knowing that I might not be the only person in the world outside my family immune to my sister’s charms.
Kit balls up the pretend hanky she’d been dabbing her eyes with, pretends to toss it into a pretend wastebasket, then raises her arms high in very real triumph. The second she came onstage, the crowd has been waiting for this moment. Resounding applause echoes through the ballroom. Kit milks it, blinking back tears and touching her trembling lips as if to ask, For me? Could all this naked adulation possibly be for, for … me? Each lip touch brings forth fresh outpourings of adoration until Bobby Moses, nodding impatiently, signals with a gesture like he’s whisking gnats away that he has seen enough. More, in fact, than enough. The quarterback jumps up and escorts Kit off the stage with both hands on her shoulders as if he were placing Miss America’s cape around them.
Onstage, Bobby Moses appropriates the microphone, and the instrument brings him to a life I had not witnessed before. I expect him to lead the crowd in another round of applause, maybe bring Kit back for an encore. Instead, he asks, “Number seven? We got a seven out there? Wherever you are, seven, get your bupkes up here unless you enjoy seeing an old man flattening his hemorrhoids on this farshtinkener metal chair. The last time I saw a chair this uncomfortable, the guy in it was begging for them to turn on the electricity. Number seven, get your tush up here.” His loquaciousness after the earlier silence is so striking it’s almost as if he needed a microphone more than vocal cords.
Kit pauses in her stately departure and looks back over her shoulder at me to ensure what she’s already certain of: that I will not take my turn. I expect to see a smug smile of triumph. But that is not her expression at all. My sister’s perfect features carry another emotion: pity.
Pity?
At the exact moment when I am completely ready to surrender to my sister without so much as shaking one tail feather, everything shifts.
Pity?
In that instant, the most significant fact about Bobby Moses’s lack of enthrallment occurs to me: He—not the Kubasaki High School drill team, not the Homecoming Court, not the cheer-leading squad, not the football team—Bobby Moses is the person who will be selecting the winner. Secure in her victory, Kit sails past me, her fans closing in behind like seagulls in the wake of a great ocean liner.
Pity?
My arm holding the number swings up over my head as if jerked aloft by a puppeteer holding a string. “I’m seven.”
“You’re seven? Mazel tov. Did it take you this long to count that high?” To the crowd he adds, “She’s not just acting dumb, folks. This is the real thing.” The small laugh he gets jolts him to his feet. He points at me. “There’s a girl who has to take off her sweater to count to two!” The laugh grows. Bobby starts pacing the stage, holding his hand out to me as he goes. “But seriously. Doesn’t she have a pretty little head? For a head, it’s pretty little.” Big laugh. Bobby stops, stares at me. “Well? What’s it gonna be, seven?”
“I have to—” I hold up my dress and run off to the bathroom.
“Just like a dame. If a broad’d been in charge of D-Day, she’d never have figured out what to wear and we’d all be sitting here in our lederhosen. No woman will ever go to the moon. She wouldn’t know what to wear!”
The old-fashioned bah-duh-bing rhythm of Bobby’s jokes follows me into the bathroom. It is a Japanese-style squatter with a toilet hole flush to the ground flanked by a pair of footrests. Bobby Moses’s patter is a distant buzz as I pull on the sew girl’s dress for the first time and a drop of sweat trickles down my side. I turn to the mirror and see that I look utterly ridiculous. On Kit, the dress made you think about what remained covered. On me, you notice that far too much is showing and that most of that is doughy and freckled. It’s impossible. I didn’t even bring the right shoes. Kit had danced in some silver pumps that worked perfectly with the dress. All I have are my water buffalo sandals. They clash so badly with the dress I kick them off.
Bobby pounds on the door. “You fall in?”
I can’t answer. At least his question wasn’t amplified over the PA.
“Gimme a knock, something. One if by land, two if by sea.”
I’m trying to figure out if I can shimmy out the small frosted-glass window above the water tank when the door opens and Bobby Moses sticks his hand in. His initials are monogrammed on the cuff of his mint-green shirt in a rococo swirl. The gold ring on his pinkie finger sports a horseshoe band of diamonds. “Give me your music. I’ll cue you up.” I give him the pirated Van Morrison album simply to make his hand go away. It withdraws, then, a second later, the door opens. Bobby stands there examining the candy-apple-red album.
Necks crane behind Bobby to get a glimpse of me. Bobby comes into the bathroom. “Nice place you got here. Which cut?”
Cut?
“Which side.”
“Uh, side A?”
“What song you want to use?”
“ ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ but I—uh … I don’t think I’m going to do this after all.” My voice is a strangled bird chirp.
“What? What? You’re not going on? No. Incorrect answer. No. Not going on is never an option. Very unprofessional.” He gives me a sour look and shakes his head, as if to clear away the improbability of my remark. “What’s with this not going on? You got your ass down here. That’s the biggest part of going on. You’re on. You’re on already. Out. Out. Out.” He herds me out of the bathroom.
In the ballroom he gives my album to the quarterback, takes my hand, and pulls me to the stage. The quarterback puts the red album on the crappy little record player. The opening chords of “Brown Eyed Girl” sound as if they’re coming out of a jack-in-the-box, as if Van Morrison in a pointed hat and clown collar will pop up and start singing.
Doo! Bobby picks up the mike. “Not that windup piece of shit. Use the good sound system. The one that other chick, number six, used.”
While they hook up the turntable to the speakers, I stand at the foot of the stage in front of the crowd. They have the look of gawkers at a car crash. I don’t want to know if Kit has come back in, so I stare intently at my bare feet. I hike my shoulders up so more of my chest will be covered and notice that the dress doesn’t so much ride as it flows up, the silver fringe becoming a waterfall shimmying back to its source. In fact, every breath I take causes the rows of silver fringe ringing the dress to fly out in tentacled ecstasy. Stationary, the dress and I don’t do much for each other, but the instant I move it comes alive.
The music s
tarts and Bobby, who’s taken his place onstage, snaps his fingers. “Hey, this swings. Seven, let’s see what you got.”
As I walk up the steps, Bobby signals for me to remove my glasses. I leave them at the edge of the stage. Suddenly the crowd of Kit worshipers becomes a distant Impressionistic painting. The only person I can see clearly is Bobby, who is grooving openly to Van.
When Van sings Hey where did we go? all I can think of is the little nerd in Taiwan transcribing lyrics for pirated albums and writing Hey, Roderigo! and I can’t keep the smile off my face. Bobby grins a Happy Buddha grin back at me, hunches his shoulders, and snaps his chunky fingers like a beatnik listening to bongo music. Like a Vegas swinger at the front table at a Frank Sinatra show. That is enough for me. I turn from my sister’s booster club and focus on Bobby and the music. I snap along with him, then start making the fringe dance. I twitch my butt west and my shoulders east and the fringe bounces around, hitting all points of the compass and looking cool at each one. I undulate and the fringe ripples like wind moving through the habu grass. Then the music takes over and I throw my whole body and every fiber of fringe into a snap with both hands over my head in a big hallelujah. Bobby starts bobbing from side to side and I pick it up and amplify it into a giant sway that pops the fringe into an exclamation of joy.
At this point, I’m so far into the music that it ceases to matter how many of my sister’s friends are praying that I will infarct and die before the next pirouette.
I become the brown-eyed girl, hair in a do rag, switching her sassy hips. Bobby loves it. He rolls his meaty hands around each other the way Moe used to when she was in her calypso phase. With that one motion I am back in Yokota, back in Pink Coke land, with Moe and Fumiko. It’s just us three and we’re all in it together.
I spin, stop on a dime, hitchhike to the edge of the galaxy and back again. I’m the python swaying in the old Okinawan woman’s hands. I’m a wisp of smoke. I’m all seven of the veils.
