by Sarah Bird
The shop reeked of dried fish. A lady barely taller than I with a bad perm and several gold teeth rushed to greet us, her getas banging on the wooden floor. She and Fumiko bowed several times and spoke in high-pitched voices that grew progressively higher. Fumiko’s twittering bird tones sounded fake to me, as if she were imitating a little girl, because the timbre of her voice was so much deeper when she spoke English. When they finished, Fumiko gestured for me to give the woman the leaf coins. I handed them over and the woman appeared delighted, as if I were an exceptional child who had accomplished a deed exceptional enough to merit the flashing of all her gold teeth and happy choruses of high-pitched hosannas. “Ano kodomo-wa honto-ni riko desu!”
Containing her amazement at my performance, the shopkeeper spread a piece of paper and filled it with candies she fished out of glass jars with a pair of lacquered chopsticks. The pile of sweets grew. I marveled that my leaf money could purchase such a hillock. Just when I thought she was finished, the shopkeeper looked at me, reassessed the depth of my genius, burst into another hallelujah chorus, and added yet another candy to the pile. Finally, she gathered the paper and twisted it into a little hobo sack. She wrapped that parcel in powder-blue tissue, covered it with a thick piece of paper printed with doll faces, then tied the whole bundle with pink ribbon. I joined Fumiko in bowing our way out of the store.
By the time I undid the layers of wrapping and was chewing on a piece of candy covered in paper that dissolved into an amazing edible slime, I had forgotten about the footprints. As I discovered jawbreakers striated with a hundred thin colored layers, powdery bubble gum, spicy-sweet ginger chews, and my favorite, the chewy white caramel Milkies, my purpose in Japan had revealed itself to me: to collect as many of the leaf coins as I could and purchase as much candy as possible.
Fumiko stayed at our house that night. After my father refused her offer to fix dinner for us, she retired to the cot he’d set up for her in the little room where she hung her apron.
“Beanie-Wienies à la Dad!” My father announced the evening’s menu as he opened several cans, sloshed them into Moe’s big cast-iron skillet, and proceeded to add squirts of all the condiments on the shelf: ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, soy sauce. “And the secret ingredient!” He dumped half of the can of Falstaff he was drinking into the mixture.
“Moe bakes them,” I informed him, deeply unsettled by this slapdash improvisation. “With brown sugar. That’s why they’re called baked beans. And she also gets one of those cans of brown bread from the commissary and heats it up; then we have cream cheese.”
“Well, this is the way I make them.” My father stirred the beans over the blue flame of the rickety two-burner propane stove. He finished off the beer and punched triangles into the top of another one.
“It’s the wrong way. Moe doesn’t do it that way.” My eyes prickled and I tried hard not to cry.
“I like them Daddy’s way.”
“All right! One vote for the old man!” He raised his can of Falstaff to Kit, who hoisted her glass of milk back at him with a party gaiety that only amplified the overwhelming fact that Moe was not there.
“Two Beanie-Wienie Supremies coming up! Sit down.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh.” He remembered my boil and slapped down a plate in front of me and one in front of Kit. Streaks of yellow mustard swirled through the soupy beans. The vinegary smell of hot pickle relish combined with the sight of the greenish chunks peppered through the slurry of beans knotted my stomach and caused me to make heaving, choking sounds.
“Do not! Repeat, do not throw up!”
I began to cry.
“Jesus Christ on a crutch!” My father tossed the wooden spoon into the skillet and a projectile of beans splashed out. “Not the goddamn waterworks.”
“She’s a crybaby.” Kit’s voice had the same even, nonjudgmental tone it had carried when she’d made this observation earlier. My father caught Kit’s eye to communicate that he agreed with her.
Kit glanced at the clock and cried out, “Sumo time!”
The screen of our television was as small as a porthole on the President Wilson. The tubes gradually warmed until grayish images appeared: two sumo wrestlers butting against each other like rams. Sumo wrestling was the only program we could get aside from plays where Japanese people, their faces painted white, sang to each other in shrieking voices so high they sounded like an old-fashioned radio being tuned to a distant, wavering station. The one other program we could receive starred a hero called Geiko Kumin who rode around on a motorbike with a towel tied around his neck. I liked that one a lot, but they kept changing the time when it appeared. Kit, on the other hand, liked sumo wrestling entirely because our father did.
On-screen a referee with a beard like a billy goat, dressed in a white gown with a small box tied to his head, waved a curious square fan to signal that the match was over. The two wrestlers parted, bowed, danced lightly down the steps and out of the arena. Two new wrestlers took their places.
“Daddy, it’s Thunder Thighs and Easter Island!” Kit called out our father’s nicknames for the wrestlers as they stepped into a ring made by a circle of fat rope, each one wearing an apron held up by coils of rope thick as dock cable with zigzag streamers hanging down. Their gleaming black hair was pulled up into topknots. One of the wrestlers wore an Ace bandage wrapped beneath a dimpled knee. When the aprons came off, they stood in their blubbery abundance wearing nothing but loincloths that wedged into the cleft between their massive buttocks. This was the only part of sumo wrestling that appealed to me, the chance to see naked butts.
The opportunity was maximized during limbering-up exercises when the giants, posteriors to the camera, squatted, stomped the ring with thunderous concussions, and balanced first on one mammoth haunch, then the other, stopping occasionally to toss handfuls of salt about.
“They’re purifying the ring,” my father explained.
Easter Island was impassive throughout, not responding to Thunder Thighs’s repertoire of theatrical expressions.
“He’s going to win,” Kit said, pointing to the comically ferocious Thunder Thighs.
“I’ll take that bet.” My father held out his palm and Kit pretended to slap imaginary money across it. “Easter Island’s gonna cream the big man. He can hold his mud. Thunder Thighs’s just a lot of hot air.”
“Says you,” my little sister sneered back.
My father grinned at my sister’s perfect imitation of him. “Hey, who taught you to talk like that?”
“I take Easter Island too,” I said, but my father and Kit didn’t look away from the set, and no one put a hand out to receive my bet.
The wrestlers crouched and approached each other several times, but the referee waved them back. Finally, they stampeded forward. Pushing and lunging, they grabbed at the black loincloths that disappeared up their butt cracks to heave each other around.
“Come on, Easter!”
“Come on, Thunder Thighs!”
“Go, Easter Island!” Only after I yelled out did I realize that my timing was off.
“He already won, dodo.”
Even though my father had explained that the object was to force the other guy either to step out of the rope ring or to touch the ground with anything but his feet, I always missed the deciding moment.
“Yay, Easter! Creamed him, I told you!” My father gloated. “Hah! You buy the beer.” Kit, leaning her whole body against the opener, happily punctured another can of Falstaff and handed it to my father.
“When is Moe coming home?” I asked. “When can I see her?”
“Visiting hours are already over today.”
“When are they tomorrow? Can we go tomorrow?”
“Look, Bernadette, your mother needs a little R and R. She’s resting. She’s not supposed to see anyone.”
I sensed the menace that lurked behind my father’s casual tone.
“She’s supposed to see me.” I hated the whiny one-blink-aw
ay-from-tears wobble of my voice and tried to swallow it down. But Kit had heard the telltale warble and was already rolling her eyes as I asked, “Did you see her? Is she going to be okay? There was blood—” By then I was sobbing openly. My father patted my back and told me not to get so worked up. Mom would be fine. But she wasn’t Mom to me; she was Moe.
I went to bed and, lying on my stomach, read the Wizard of Oz book I’d had my father bring me from the base library. I waited for the series’ usual narcotic effect, strong as the one that overtook Dorothy when she walked across the poppy fields, to sweep me away. But it didn’t. The story of The Laughing Dragon of Oz was hollow and heartless, as out of kilter as my world had become the instant Moe left. Worse, it was about a boy. I checked the spine of the book and noticed the two traitorous letters following Frank Baum’s name: Jr. In the foreword that I’d ignored in my haste to achieve escape velocity, I learned that the real L. Frank Baum had died in 1919 and his imposter son, the incompetent pretender, Jr., had authored this bit of counterfeit pulp.
Then the full implications of such treachery truly settled in and my heart raced and I had to open my mouth to breathe: If even the great L. Frank Baum could die, never to write another book, leaving his child, inadequate and unprepared, behind …
From down the alley, the insect whir of the pachinko parlor clattered and droned. I remembered our last move, when we drove from Wichita Falls to Mather Air Force Base and took a detour to see the Grand Canyon, where I’d plucked up all my courage and peeked down into that endless emptiness. I had the same feeling now, thinking about my life without Moe.
I slammed the book shut, ripped open my pink All About Dinosaurs book, and began to read, racing after the words until they formed a vision of a peg-toothed brontosaurus munching its way through forests of ferns so compelling that my heart slowed and my stomach unknotted.
It was dark and the alley was silent when the car’s headlights shining through our paper screens woke me up. The roar of the engine cannonaded through the sleeping paper-and-wood alley. I slid back the paper screen at the window just a crack. Just enough to see Major Wingo behind the wheel of his Pontiac. My father stepped into the alley. Major Wingo leaned out the window and said, “Mace, Tachikawa Hospital called. It’s Moe.”
My father was dressed and in the car in less time than it took me to start crying. Kit, snoring loudly beside me, never woke up.
I stood at the open window for a long time, long enough for the cold to seep up through my feet and chill my whole body, crying, yearning for the Pontiac to return with my mother.
My bedroom door slid back but I refused to turn around until Fumiko hissed at me several times. She wore a gray sweater over her navy blue kimono and had tabi, white cotton socks with a separate pocket for her big toe, on her feet. She waved for me to follow her.
The kitchen was warm and smelled like my idea of heaven, cooked sugar. On a plate on the table, sections of candied tangerine were arranged in a pinwheel. Fumiko gestured for me to eat one. My intense love of all things sugared overcame my equally intense antipathy toward fruits and vegetables, and I put one of the sections in my mouth. The lightly caramelized coating crackled slightly as it gave way beneath my teeth and then blended with a squirt of sweet citrus juice.
Melted sugar bubbled like lava in the black skillet, then sizzled and hissed as Fumiko slid in the unglazed tangerine sections. She arranged another plateful and set them down before me on the table, where I stood and ate with an automatic intensity. As long as my mouth was flooded with sweetness, I could keep the terrifying awareness of Moe’s absence at bay.
“Doing wah-wah—ne?—Fumiko mutter aw-mose die.”
I couldn’t make any sense of Fumiko’s words. I wondered if she was using the baby word for water, wah-wah. Seeing my confusion, Fumiko gestured for me to wait. “Momento, kudasai.” A minute later she returned, paging through a small red Japanese-English dictionary. The little red book ushered Fumiko and me into a realm where my pedantic bookworm tendencies blended perfectly with her incomprehensible eagerness to communicate and console. I couldn’t understand why she seemed to like me so much in spite of how fiercely I pushed her away.
With Fumiko pointing to the English words beside the kanji characters and me prissily reading out their meanings, I translated her words into “During the war, my mother almost died.” I had to know this story of a mother almost dying.
“What happened?”
“Wah-wah short time, ne? Takusan, takusan, takusan, uh …” She searched the dictionary until she found the word written in kanji characters, pointed to it, and I supplied, “Bad.” Pushing the little dictionary between us like the planchette of a Ouija board that pointed to the words you needed to know, I deciphered not just what Fumiko had said but what she meant: “The last days of the war were the worst.”
At that moment of my desperation and Fumiko’s inexplicable desire to comfort me, with the scent of caramelized sugar soothing me, we both became unguarded children and communicated in the telepathic way of children. Though Fumiko’s actual speech was still childish and ungrammatical, something magical happened between us. The missing articles, l’s turned into r’s, mangled syntax, all disappeared and, combined with the children’s Japanese I’d overheard in the alley and a little help from the dictionary, Fumiko’s story formed itself directly in my imagination.
“The last days of the war were the worst,” Fumiko began. “Late in 1944, the bombing was so heavy that my mother and my little brother and I were evacuated from our fine house in Tokyo. The government sent us to a village where we didn’t know anyone. My mother wrapped the baby and carried him on her back, and we pushed our futon and our pots and pans and my mother’s kimonos in a cart to a cave. Yes! We lived in a cave! We chased out the bats and the snakes, but the smell of their shit remained.
“Our cave was near a village built on rocky soil where no rice would grow, so the villagers grew wheat and millet. Japanese who have no rice are mean and bitter people. The men were either woodcutters or charcoal burners. The women tended tiny vegetable gardens, braided straw into sandals or rain capes, and sent their children into the woods to hunt for herbs, nuts, and roots. We hunted with them and brought back roots and weeds that gave us diarrhea.
“The villagers took advantage of us. For a small fish, for some millet mixed with wheat and mock barley, for some nuts and a withered eggplant, they would demand one of my mother’s kimonos. For a chicken and a dozen quail eggs, they took her wedding kimono stitched with golden thread and carefully preserved with camphor. When all my mother’s kimonos were gone, she made soup with grass that tasted like dirt and left us even hungrier than we were before we ate it. At first, my brother and I cried for food; then I was too tired to make any sound. When she nursed my brother, my mother cried because there was no milk left and it felt as if he were pulling electricity from her empty breasts.
“My brother died, and overnight my mother became an old woman. Her hair dangled in wisps around the shoulders of her dirty cotton kimono. Worst of all, she no longer made any effort to keep her knees properly closed when she sat down. My mother! Before the war she used to tie my legs together with a silk sash, so that even in sleep I would resist such vulgar postures.
“She looked like a scarecrow. This frightened me worse than the air raids, which turned the mountain ridges pink. Worse even than thinking about myself dying. One morning, she could not make herself stand and lay all day on the futon and whimpered in the same sick kitten way my brother had before he died. I knew what I had to do.
“At sunset, I crawled out of the damp cave, faced Fuji-san, and made my offering. If she would spare the life of my mother, I would give her my own.
“The next morning, I awoke to find a pair of legs in dust-covered soldier’s boots standing beside my futon. I barely recognized my father in his uniform with his cap and greatcoat. My mother was bowing before him, her head on the ground until my father threw off his backpack; then my mother unwound th
e moss-green gaiters around his ankles, a white puff of dust blowing into her face each time she unwrapped a round.
“My father didn’t say much. He gave each one of us a chunk of rock sugar from his satchel. At first I was too shy to take it from his hand, so he put it in my lap. I will never forget the taste of that sugar. My mother put hers in her mouth and, her lips paler than her teeth, she smiled. I knew that Fuji-san had taken my offering. My mother would live.”
By the time Fumiko finished, a milky predawn opalescence lightened the little house and a liquid warbling of notes was flowing from Chisaii’s cage.
I asked, “But if Fuji-san took your offering and your mother lived, why are you still alive?”
But Fumiko put away the little red dictionary and acted as if she couldn’t understand my question. It didn’t matter, though; she had already told me what I needed to know.
I left her and went to my perfume factory. In the backyard, my breath clouded in the cool, damp air. I stood next to the barbed-wire fence. On the ground were the bottles of honeysuckle perfume I’d concocted, already turning to slime.
Fuji-san was hidden behind a scrim of misty gray. The farmer came into his field. His straw raincoat and rain hat reminded me of the cruel villagers. Over his shoulders was a pole with buckets on either end. He unhitched one of the buckets, carried it to the pale green shoots piercing the black earth, crouched over, and ladled a bit of the dark soup onto each plant’s roots.
As he scuttled away down the row, the sun burnt through the clouds above Fuji-san. The mountain was pink in the morning light and rays of gold streamed out from behind her. That was when I made my deal with Fuji-san: If the sacred mountain would return my mother to me, she could have the life of my sister.
