by Sarah Bird
“Let’s all draw a picture of the new girl crying,” she invited the class, the morning after three-for-one Manhattan night at the club, which, unfortunately, coincided with the commencement of my third straight week of blubbering.
Kit’s new-girl experience was radically different. She woke up early every morning and dressed herself in the outfit she’d color-coordinated and laid out the night before, eager not to miss a moment of fun at her new kindergarten, where both boys and girls chased her around the playground and tried to kiss her.
I, on the other hand, prayed nightly for illness. I prefered that it not be a deadly one, but if death was the only way out of Bob Hope Elementary, I was willing to accept it.
“You just have to be a friend to make a friend,” my mother counseled, as she braided my hair while I sat on a high stool in the kitchen, snuffling, begging to stay home. That I had no more clue how to be a friend than I did how to make one, that the process was so foreign I couldn’t even ask a question about it, filled me with desolation. The song of the canary Moe had bought to cheer me up only emphasized how un–cheered up I was and depressed me even further. We’d named the bird Chisaii after Moe had gotten out the English-Japanese dictionary and found the word for “small.” As Chisaii warbled, I mourned for the lost paradise of those days of the past summer before we moved, when Moe would put on her Harry Belafonte album and we’d calypso through the housework, Moe swinging her hips saucily as she pushed the Electrolux, me operating the feather duster, both of us singing loud enough to be heard over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.
Daylight come and me wanna stay home!
“Don’t make me go. Don’t make me go. Please, please, please, don’t make me go,” I begged. “I’ll clean up the whole house for you.”
But Moe didn’t need me to help her with the dusting anymore. The intruder, Fumiko, helped her now. Fumiko was always there, silent, smiling, nodding, taking the broom out of my mother’s hands when she tried to sweep, chirping in her hateful Japanese and touching her own stomach to remind Moe that she was pregnant. Then Fumiko would shoo Moe toward a chair, where she plopped down heavily, and bring her a cup of tea. The realization that the stranger had taken my place undid me.
“You’re a crybaby.” Kit, standing next to the stool, did not make this observation in an unkind way; she simply stated an obvious fact. I kicked her in the mouth with the toe of my new school shoe hard enough to make her lip bleed. Chisaii’s warbling grew abruptly louder in the split second of stunned silence that fell after the kick. Then, in rapid succession, Moe slapped me, Kit broke into a full wail, and Moe grabbed her belly, sucking in sharp breaths.
Moe’s face paled and her fingers clawed spasmodically at the countertop. Fear paralyzed my breathing and the canary’s hateful singing grew far too loud. Then Moe breathed again and, without losing a beat, I took up my refrain. “Don’t make me go. Don’t make me go. Please, please, please, don’t—”
Moe slapped me again and shoved me out the door. In the alley, I turned to see her squinching her face up in pain and grabbing the mound of her stomach while Fumiko helped her back to bed.
On the long bus ride to school, Kit sat in the back row with all the little girls vying to be her friend. I sat up front, right behind the driver, and stared out the window at construction workers wearing white headbands and black rubber boots with the big toe separate from the rest and thought they were the luckiest humans in the world. I wished with all my heart I could trade places with any one of them.
At the end of that interminable day, after I’d memorized the spelling words before anyone else and written an extra-credit report on marsupials, and cried at recess, and cried at lunch, and cried when Miss Ransom called on me, I rode the bus home alone because the base commander’s daughter had invited Kit to her house. When we finally arrived at Fussa, I rushed through the drizzle that hadn’t stopped since we arrived. I turned down our alley and, running, ignored all the strange sights and sounds, holding my breath against the stink of the benjo ditches until I was back in my home, away from all the outsiders, and could breathe again.
“Moe!” My voice cracked. It was the first word I had spoken since leaving that morning. “Moe?” I rushed into the house past the flat bowl laid with river stones where Fumiko had arranged three purple irises, impaling their crisp stalks on a barbed weight. I pushed back the paper-paneled door to my parents’ room and found Moe lying in bed. Fumiko was there, setting a cup of tea on the nightstand. She melted away when she saw me glaring at her.
“Why are you in bed?” My tone was accusatory.
“I’m just tired, that’s all, poops. Come here.”
My parents had a real bed because my father refused to sleep on the futons that had come with the house.
“I’m sorry I slapped you this morning.” Moe put her hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, far cooler than it should have been.
“Two times,” I reminded her.
“I’m twice as sorry.”
“It hurt.” I didn’t have to try very hard to leak out a delicious, self-pitying tear.
“I know, baby, I know.”
Moe pulled me into bed and snuggled with me. I closed my eyes and inhaled her smell. The tears were gone in an instant and I remembered what I wanted to show her.
“Look!” I wiggled my front tooth with my tongue. “It’s almost out.” The tooth had been loose for over a week and was hanging on by a thin thread of gum tissue. I wished the worthless baby tooth would fall out; it stabbed me every time I took a bite.
With no warning, Moe winced as if a loud noise had hurt her ear. “Could you go outside and play?” Her question came out in little gasps. “I need to rest. Please, just go outside.”
Fumiko pulled me away; I hadn’t even heard her approach. I jerked away from her soft grasp and looked to my mother to save me, but her eyes were closed. Worse, Moe reached out her hand to Fumiko and squeezed it tight while she sucked air in through her teeth. I slammed out the back door.
Behind our house was a yard of beaten dirt ringed by a barbed-wire fence. The top of the rusted fence was crowned with a collapsed heap of honeysuckle. Beyond the fence spread the field of a farmer who drank tea from a tiny brass pot. He wore a conical straw hat, and on rainy days added a cape, also woven of straw, so that he looked like the roof of a very small thatched cottage moving about his small field. We worked silently on opposite sides of the barbed wire. He on his farm, I on my perfume factory.
I’d started the perfume factory because all my toys were still with the rest of our belongings on a cargo freighter weeks away from arriving. Fortunately, Moe always had bottles. I’d emptied out the brown stoppered bottle the nose drops from my last cold had come in from the dispensary on Mather Air Force Base. Also the bottle of cough syrup, Eileen’s leftover St. Joseph’s baby aspirin, and the last bit of emerald-green Prell shampoo. The bowers of honeysuckle in my new location inspired me, and every day after school I escaped into the drizzle, outside, away from Fumiko, to collect flowers and turn them into the perfume that would make me so famous they’d have to let me out of Miss Ransom’s class.
Absorbed in the business of capturing the white flowers’ sweet smell, I forgot everything: Moe’s pain, Fumiko’s unwelcome presence, even Miss Ransom. I stuffed a bowl with the blossoms and pounded them to a gray slurry ready for bottling. I was filling the Prell bottle when I noticed that, for the first time since we landed, the misty drizzle had stopped and the sun was warming my back. It must have been out for a while because, when I looked up, the clouds had burned away and in the distance far beyond the farmer’s field a mountain was visible for the first time. It had the same conical shape as the farmer’s straw hat. A ruff of pink clouds hung about the peak’s snowy summit, making it look like something especially good from the bakery, a bun with pink frosting and powdered sugar.
As the sun came out, I saw for the first time that Japan was a scrumptious country. The dark earth of the farmer’s field and its layer of
green vines were the exact colors of an Andes mint. The scattering of dried weeds called to mind the toasted coconut crispness of Chicken Bones. But the earth—the earth was the luscious almost-black brown of hot fudge. And the pink clouds around the mountain; the more I stared at them, the more they looked like cotton candy. Like Brach’s cherry nougat. Like pink Neccos.
Lost in a candy reverie, I was startled by Fumiko’s voice whispering at my ear, “Fuji-san.” I turned, ready to run, to hide from the stranger, but her face was right at my level, stopping my escape. For the first time, I was forced to inspect it closely. Astonishingly, I found that, like her country, Fumiko’s face was candied, an apple dipped in a shiny caramel glaze with patches of red at the cheeks and lips. And her hair and eyes were not black, but the same almost-black hot-fudge brown of the earth. “The name of mountain, we call Fuji-san.”
“You speak English. Major Wingo said you only spoke a few words.”
She laughed like one of the bunnies in Bambi and covered her mouth. “Sukoshi.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, barely parted. “Very little bit.”
It took me a moment to understand that an adult could speak like a child, turning v’s into b’s and l’s into r’s so that “very little” came out as “berry rittoe.” Her babyishness made me feel grownup and strong. She dipped her head in a deferential way that reinforced my feeling of power and pointed her graceful, cranelike hand toward the mountain.
“Fuji-san most holy mountain of Japan.”
Even before I could translate “horry” into “holy,” in my child’s anthropology, I concluded that the people of Japan wore conical hats and carried conical umbrellas in honor of their holy mountain’s holy shape.
“The tooth of you mouth?” Fumiko pointed tentatively to my loose tooth. “You wish it go away?”
I nodded. “It pokes me.”
“When I am a little girl”—hearing her say “rittoe gurrow” made me feel like a big one—“my mother …” Fumiko pursed her lips and I supplied the word she pantomimed.
“Blow.”
Fumiko was delighted by my remarkable intelligence. “Hai! Dozo. Broe. My mother broe.” She spread her hand to indicate a vanished tooth, then inclined her whole body toward me to offer the question: “I broe?”
I nodded, not certain what I was agreeing to.
“Close eyes.” Her hand slid over my eyes and Fumiko blew the smell of talcum powder and rice crackers and of the jasmine flowers in her green tea into my open mouth. I was thinking what silly, infantile people these Japanese were when Fumiko pulled her hand away. Light cracked across my eyes. I was about to ask why she hadn’t taken my tooth out like she said she would when I tasted the salt of blood and looked into her hand. My small white tooth rested in a foamy pink slush in her palm. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother about this marvel, our maid’s magical power to blow teeth out of a person’s head. Fumiko pulled a handkerchief out of the sleeve of her kimono and pressed it against the empty spot in my gum.
She cleaned my tooth and held it up. “In Japan when tooth come out, you throw up in …” She steepled her hands together and I barked out, “Roof.” “Hai! Hai! Domo arigato, roof, and you make wish. Tooth is presento to …” She pointed up.
“Gods?” I supplied.
Her smooth brow creased; she shook her head, held my tooth up next to her mouth, and pretended to gnaw it. “Like Mickey.”
“Mouse?”
“Hai! More.”
She stretched her hands apart and I guessed, “Bigger? Rats?”
“Hai! Rats. Presento for rats.” She put the tooth in my hand.
The pedant and xenophobe burst awake in me. “We do something better in America. We put it under our pillow and the tooth fairy comes and gives you a dime.”
“Fumiko!” My mother’s voice alarmed me, as did the startled look that widened Fumiko’s eyes before she hurried off, sliding swiftly out of her sandals at the doorway without missing a step.
I looked at my tooth and imagined Fumiko wishing for and receiving one of the chalk-faced dolls in a red kimono with golden threads that I’d seen propped up in dusty shop windows. I would never have wasted a wish on a doll. I would have asked for an insect-collecting kit with actual syringes and formaldehyde or that game I’d seen in the PX where a light went on if you knew that the heart was a muscle or that the formula for water was H2O and touched metal probes to the right answer.
It was exciting to discover that in Japan little girls’ wishes were granted. Back in America my wishes—for a blond cocker spaniel like Lady in Lady and the Tramp, for blond hair, for a friend, not to have to move, not, in fact, to ever have to leave my house again—were always ignored. Even when I prayed three rosaries to the Blessed Virgin.
I was not about to give my tooth away for ten cents or throw it to the rats. Not when I had the most holy mountain in Japan right in front of me. I dragged the high stool into the backyard, shoved it next to the fence, climbed up, cleared away the honeysuckle vines, and carefully placed my tooth on the top of the fence so that it was in a direct line with the scoop of the crater at Fuji-san’s crest. Then I shut my eyes and whispered my wish from the bottom of my heart.
The next morning, when a boil large enough to keep me home from Bob Hope Elementary appeared on my backside, I switched my allegiance from the Blessed Virgin Mary to Fuji-san.
Released from the terror of school, I snuggled into the futon that made me feel as if I were camping out, breathed in the clean grass smell of the tatami mats covering the floor, and listened to the sounds in the alley. Children chattered words that clacked and exploded as they walked to school. The night-soil man, his honey buckets balanced on a yoke over his neck, thumped past. A noodle vendor tootled some notes on his flute and called out hoarsely, advertising his wares. The wooden getas of housewives clattered past. I listened to my father and Kit.
“Oats for my wee bonnie lassie.” My father banged the wooden spoon he used to serve oatmeal against the side of Eileen’s bowl. I imagined her, long curls tied to one side with a blue bow, watching my father, her small teeth parted in open-lipped admiration.
“No milk, okay, Daddy? Japan milk is yucky.”
It was true. The commissary sold an odd mixture of reconstituted powdered milk “filled” with coconut oil, but Moe still made us drink it. “Just brown sugar and butter.”
A bit later, I heard my father buttoning Eileen into her red coat—“Hold still, you wiggle worm”—and then they left, my sister begging my father not to ride in front with the taxi driver but to sit in back, right next to her.
I waited for the best sound of all, Moe singing, her voice prettier than any of the records she sang along with. But Chisaii was the only one singing that morning and, once the sun rose high enough, even he stopped.
I woke up again when the front door slid open and Fumiko’s soft tread padded past my room as she hurried to the little room by the back door where her work apron hung on a nail, next to the sink and above her bucket.
“Good morning—” Fumiko chirped out from the hallway, then hesitated. My mother had told her to cut out this “my dam” business and just call her Moe like everyone else. So Fumiko now simply avoided direct address altogether. I heard the whisper of Moe’s door being opened.
A moment later, Fumiko yanked my door open. She was pulling her apron off. “Stay in you room. I get taxi for Moe.”
By the time I decided to disobey, Fumiko and a ropy little driver in a battered sea captain’s hat were helping my mother into a cab. Moe had her beige trench coat on over her flannelette nightgown.
“Moe!” I cried out. When she turned, her chestnut hair looked too dark against her pale face.
“Be good, poops,” she said, and Fumiko and the driver helped her into the cab. Beneath my feet, prints of her feet were stamped in blood on the tatami mats.
She grabbed Fumiko’s hand. “Stay with Bernie.” Each word cost Moe an effort. Fumiko nodded, closed the door of the cab, stepped back, and stoo
d beside me. We stared down the alley long after the cab had vanished.
Eventually, Fumiko tried to herd me back into the house. “Mama be okay.”
I jerked away from her. “She’s not your mother. She’s my mother!”
“Hai! Gomen nasai! So sorry.”
Having an adult grovel before me cheered me up enough that I broke into blubbering wails. As I cried, Fumiko unwound her kimono sleeves, which she kept bound up when she worked, reached in, and pulled out a small leather coin purse. From the purse she extracted three dull silver ten-yen coins and pressed them into my palm. They were as light as old leaves.
Without a word, Fumiko led me down the alley and out onto the main street of Fussa. Housewives in wooden getas and dull gray kimonos, holding string bags, stopped dead on the brick sidewalk to watch as Fumiko pulled an odd round-eye child through streets where few Americans appeared.
We passed a restaurant with a glass case in front displaying platters of golden-battered tempura and bowls with noodles hanging, frozen, from chopsticks, all made out of wax. We passed a newsstand. Chains lay across the magazines. All the covers faced the wrong way and most seemed to feature the same kittenish Japanese woman, her hair either pulled back in a French twist or tucked under a jaunty Peter Pan hat cocked over her eye at a rakish angle.
The fanciest shop in town had a life-size cutout of a smiling Japanese woman in a purple kimono printed with cherry blossoms outside. The cutout woman held a sign that read in English, WELCOME TO OUR REXALL DRUG STORE. In her other hand she extended a handwritten sign, also in English, that asked, YOU DON’T FEEL WELL? TRY A MILTOWN. I wanted to look at the watches and face creams arrayed in glass display cases around boxes of Rinso White soap powder, but Fumiko tugged me on.
We turned into another alley, this one lined with cheap noodle houses with navy blue banners slashed by white ideograms hanging at the top of the open doorways. Fumiko led me to a small shop where blue plastic buckets, pink plastic dishpans, white and turquoise plastic beach balls, and pink swim floats in the shape of horses hung outside.
