by Sarah Bird
I explode a gasp of exasperation and head for the door.
“Hey, wait! I know what it is.” Bobby beams with inspiration. “You’re nervous ’cause we’re playing your hometown!”
In fact, Bobby is right about one thing: I am getting my period. But he is so wrong about everything else and has been so wrong from the moment I first set eyes on him that I can no longer stand it. Like an aneurysm exploding, something bursts inside my head.
“Are you a complete moron? This is not my hometown. A hometown is where you go back and they remember you from when you were a kid. This is like being Jewish and going back to Krakow or something. All the buildings are the same, but everyone you ever knew is dead or PCS’d, which amounts to the same thing. For me, Yokota is a fully populated ghost town. I can’t go back and visit my old teachers or my old neighbors or even the guy who sold me Mad magazines in the BX when I was nine or the girl who sat next to me on the bus in second grade. She’s gone. They’re all gone. They’ve been transferred three, four, five times since then, and they wouldn’t remember me any more than I’d remember them. This is not my hometown. Military brats don’t have hometowns.”
“Moe said you might feel that way.”
“Moe? When did you talk to my mother?”
“Me and Moe, we got a lot in common. Your father’s lucky he spotted her first. Me and Moe, we see eye to eye.”
The thought of my mother being eye-to-eye or any-organ-to-any-other-organ with Bobby Moses unsettles me deeply.
“Don’t make that face. Your mother is a very attractive woman. Very Catholic. Very married. So, we talked a few times. She’s a good mother. She wants to be sure her daughter’s safe. So, you’re sure there’s no one.”
“There’s no one.”
“Mazel tov, you’re the man without a country. You’re sure there’s no one?”
The twinkly way he keeps asking this question annoys me even further. “How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know anyone here and no one here knows me and that’s the way I like it. I’m just passing through.”
“Just passing through, huh? Moe said that was your problem.”
“Moe said—”
“Just passing through. No friends. No roots. You sound like a prune. Yeah, that’s you, Zelda. You’re a prune in the duodenum of life. Just don’t be surprised when you get shit out. Go. Get dressed. We got a show to do.”
Bobby is jollier than I have ever seen him, as if my asking if he were a complete moron and insinuating that he and his idol are gigantic losers has brought us closer together. I leave Bobby probing a nostril with a pair of cuticle scissors, snipping at the thicket of hair within. I want to kick the door, after I slam it behind me and hear him laughing on the other side as if he has some juicy secret I don’t know anything about.
Kool
We are the entertainment that night for the annual Costume Ball at the Top 3 Enlisted Officers’ Club. The emcee announces the start of the costume contest. Everyone takes a seat at tables ringing the dance floor to applaud the work of a platoon of sew girls as the contestants parade across the low stage in their costumes: a caveman, an astronaut, Marie Antoinette, a couple of Marilyn Monroes. By popular acclamation, however, the plainest pair of costumes takes the big prize of the evening. A middle-aged couple, Master Sergeant Randy Cox and his wife, Betty, take the Best Costume prize for stapling themselves into sacks of brown butcher paper. They wear matching terry-cloth bedroom slippers and their calves are bare. On the front of Cox’s sack is his name, COX. Written on the front of his wife’s is COX’S OL’ BAG. As the Coxes rustle offstage to a big round of applause, the emcee brings Bobby on.
Since there is no backstage, I stand at the far end of the room and wait to go on. From a distance, as Bobby’s tux shimmers electric blue under a lone spot and Julius Caesar and Pocahontas laugh at his lame jokes, Bobby looks like the real thing.
“So this Japanese dame has a white baby. Just goes to show ya, Occidents can happen.”
Bah-bing!
“Hey, you guys with Japanese wives, what’s her favorite day? Erection day, hai! Am I right?”
I wince with embarrassment for all the Japanese wives, but both jokes get big laughs.
“Oh, look, Katsumi there in the Cleopatra outfit doesn’t get it. She’s asking Marc Antony what the joke is. Oops, he’s waving her off. Erection Day nebber hoppen. Velly solly, Chollie! Poor Katsumi, she don’t get it. She just don’t get it at all!”
Marc Antony’s pals are slugging him good-naturedly when Bobby announces me. The band breaks into an especially cheesy version of “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” and I walk through the tables toward the stage.
I would never have recognized her, sitting at the farthest edge of the semicircle of tables. It is the coat I recognize because it was Moe’s coat: a beautiful A-line dove-gray mouton with a shawl collar. Where Fumiko once seemed beautiful to me in a Japanese way, she now seems beautiful in a Western, an American way. Unlike the odd sexlessness of most Japanese women, their hair tied in pigtails with Minnie Mouse holders, their breasts flattened, giggling and covering their mouths, Fumiko is a grown woman. She sits alone at the table smoking a cigarette with the defiant seductiveness of Ava Gardner and holding an envelope with my mother’s handwriting on the outside.
Onstage, a conspiratorial twinkle lights Bobby’s eye. Moe obviously gave him a copy of the letter to Fumiko.
Before Fumiko can look up, I glance away and force myself to walk to the front of the room, unable now to hear the awful music for the blood rushing through my head. Onstage, the knowledge that there is one person watching who knows me paralyzes me. To survive this moment, I draw upon years of standing alone in the center of miles of varnished gym floor, listening to team captains argue over who will have to take me for their teams. I initiate a spasmodic jerking of my limbs that finally ends when Bobby sweeps onstage.
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that was the Amazing Zelda doing her impression of a hippie fighting her way out of a bathtub!”
I try to leave, my gaze firmly trained away from Fumiko, but Bobby holds my hand in a death grip.
“You gotta forgive her, folks, there’s someone in the audience Zelda hasn’t seen for a long time. Let’s bring her up with a big hand, Miss Fumiko Tanaguchi!” All the costumed clubgoers turn to look at Fumiko and clap.
Fumiko comes to the stage. I submerge more deeply into myself than I ever have before. Bobby stands between us and holds up our hands. The crowd applauds like we’re two contestants on Queen for a Day.
“All right, already. Enough with old home week. Go hog someone else’s spotlight.” Bobby shoos us off the stage, and we find our way to the exit.
Outside, the sultry night is alive with the drone of cicadas. I am grateful for the darkness, for the insect noise. I can think of nothing to say.
Fumiko pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the coat pocket, lights one up, and inhales. She smokes Moe’s brand, Kools. “Hey, whassamatta you? You no rike see Fumiko?”
Fumiko sounds like a Koza bar girl, a pan-pan girl. She is not the shy delicate young woman I remember. On each word Fumiko speaks, on the hearty brusque manner she affects, are the fingerprints of all the GIs who have passed through her life for the past eight years.
“No, no, I’m happy to see you.”
“Hey, you not so shy no more.” She shakes her shoulders, miming me dancing. “What hoppen?”
“You’re not so shy either.” I mimic her: “What hoppen you?”
“Oh, you wise guy now, huh? At first I think you Eye-reen.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You hair. You”—she makes a pouty face—“I think, must be Eye-reen. Bernie? Nebber hoppen.”
“Well, it’s me.” The cicadas’ screech seems to grow louder. “I guess Bobby gave you Moe’s letter.”
“You read retter?”
It is an effort to have to discuss such a personal matter with a complete stranger, a stranger wearing my mother’s coat.
>
“Not really.”
“What ‘no rearry’? You read, you no read.”
“I read it.”
“Okay, so why rong face? You mad?”
“I’m not mad.”
“Don’t shit me, I’m you favorite turd.”
I really, really, really do not feel like discussing any of this in the middle of the Top 3 Club parking lot. “Isn’t it kind of hot to be wearing a coat?”
“Hot as hair. I just want you remember.”
Fumiko takes the coat off. She wears a tight shirt that shows off her broad shoulders and high breasts. She strokes the coat, silver now in the purplish illumination from the crime light high on a pole above the parking lot.
“You remember coat?”
I remember. Moe had worn it on the ship coming over. She’d worn it all through the last months of her pregnancy with the twins. She gave it to Fumiko after Fumiko showed up for work one snowy morning wearing nothing but a pink cardigan sweater.
“How you mama? How Moe?”
“Good. Pretty good.”
“How my baby?”
She means Buzz. With his eyes swollen into slits by his chubby cheeks and his spiky black hair, the joke was that he was Fumiko’s child. It doesn’t seem funny to me now, and I can’t keep the stiffness out of my voice. “Fine.”
“You mad me?”
“No.”
“You mad at anybody, be mad at RaRue.”
“LaRue? You mean LaRue Wingo?”
“Sure. She the one to brame.”
“You know, I realize that Moe wrote in her letter that … whatever happened might have happened anyway. I guess that’s what Moe thinks. So I don’t blame you, okay? I don’t blame my father. But I’m sure the hell not going to blame LaRue Wingo. I’m really tired. I’m going to go now, and—”
Fumiko grabs my arm as I start to leave. “You think … me and you father? Me and Captain Root?”
“Look, I really don’t want to—”
“Nebber hoppen.” Her fingers dig into me. “That nebber, nebber hoppen.” Tears stand in Fumiko’s eyes, making them into ovoids of black obsidian so dark that any emotion could hide within their depth. For one instant they are unguarded, and I see clearly that I know nothing about this woman. Fumiko exhales loneliness scented with menthol as if she’d drawn it from her cigarette.
“Why you think me and Captain Root? Captain Root? No! Nebber, nebber hoppen. Captain Root too … too …” Frustrated, Fumiko flutters her hands about her head and mutters in Japanese, searching for the word. “Too …” She genuflects and makes the sign of the cross. “You understand? Why he want to? He marry Moe. Why go out for hamburger when you got steak at home? You berieve Fumiko? I rying, I dying. You berieve Fumiko? … Prease.”
Fumiko looks up at me, and the hearty brusqueness of a thousand dates with a thousand servicemen falls away like a mask. All the Americanness leaves her face and Fumiko is, once again, the young woman who touched my widow’s peak in that mysterious way then welcomed our family to the little house in Fussa with a movement graceful as a crane in flight. She is the person who blew my loose tooth out. Who made candied tangerines when I thought my mother was never going to come home. Who sang Day-oh with Moe and liked me better than Kit from the very first moment, and I know her completely.
“Yes.” I believe Fumiko. I believe the truth I always knew.
Bar-girl English still comes out of Fumiko’s mouth, but once again I can hear the words she means to speak instead. I know that her answer to me is, “I’m glad, Bernie. Glad that you believe me. That makes me happier than I can say.”
I hear this in my head. What Fumiko actually says is, “Fumiko takusan grad. You ichi-ban asshore buddy.”
But I don’t hear that. Once again, I can hear what Fumiko means. The magic that found us when we first spoke together in the shadow of Fuji-san wakes again and I can fill in all the blanks, add in articles, make subjects and verbs agree, intuit meaning from the tilt of Fumiko’s eyebrow, the semaphores she flags with her hands.
“Fumiko, if you and my father didn’t—you know, weren’t involved, why did they stop talking about you? Take out all your photos. Pretend like you never existed?”
“Why not? I was your maid, not your sister.”
“You were more than that.”
“You should ask Moe this question.”
“I’m asking you.”
“You don’t remember? You were there.”
“Remember what?”
“If Moe hasn’t told you, I can’t tell you. Moe knows that you will remember what you need to remember.”
“Zelda, there you are! I been looking all over this farshtinkener club for you. They loved the reunion bit. Let’s do it again tomorrow.”
Bobby puts his arm around Fumiko. “What I tell you?” He points to me. “Number-one girl-san.” He taps his head. “College girl. Big brain. Me presento you from Moe.”
“Moe steky-ne?”
It is jarring to hear the bar-girl English return as they discuss how beautiful my mother is.
“Moe takusan takusan steky.”
Bobby pulls Fumiko closer. “You pretty goddamned steky yourself. We go Club Tokyo together?”
“Anone! Fumiko have job-u go, ne?”
With a flirty laugh, Fumiko squirms out of Bobby’s grasp, grabs my hand, and pulls us both away.
“Do shi’te. What’sahurry?”
“Dekinai, Bobby-san. No can stay. Go job-u.”
“Job-u, right. What’s his name? How ’bout you-me job-u?”
Fumiko pulls me away as she flags down a Kota Kab.
“The club. Ten. Tomorrow,” is all Fumiko tells me, before she jumps into the old black Dodge, but I know what she means. She issues orders to the driver in harsh Japanese. He pulls away quickly.
Bobby lumbers to my side. We watch the red taillights disappear.
“Hey, Moe didn’t tell me the old family retainer’d be such a babe.”
I don’t answer.
“Don’t forget, we got the big one tomorrow. We play the Yokota Officers’ Club. You gotta shine for that one, Zelda. Gotta really sparkle. Yokota O Club, that’s like the Tropicana of service clubs. Am I right or am I right?”
“You’re right, Bobby,” I say, and remember the time when it was true.
Onion Rings
I’m early the next morning. In a far corner of the parklike grounds in front of the Yokota Officers’ Club, I wait at the foot of a Japanese bridge arching over a pond stocked with koi fish grown to an immense size. The fish crowd the edge of the pond, sucking greedily at the cracker crumbs I sprinkle on them. Japanese lawnmen push mowers around the topiary shrubs and stone lanterns. Wives loaded down with towels and beach balls, surrounded by swarms of children, pass by on gravel paths heading to the pool, where swim lessons are in progress.
Before I reach the high fence surrounding the pool, the morning breeze brings the scent of chlorine, Coppertone, rubber swim caps, and warm wet cement and I am swamped by nostalgia. I remember the dressing rooms where Moe and LaRue and the other wives, heads cocked to one side, would tuck their hair into thick white rubber swim caps with rubber flowers bunched above one ear like a droopy corsage. Where they shimmied into bathing suits with zippers and stays and breastpieces that held the shape of a bosom even without anyone inside them. I would stare at their nipples, some as small and pink as pencil erasers, others as big and dark as Oreos, the bellies with silver stretch marks, the beard between their legs, and try to figure out the mesmerizing/repellent power of those bodies.
“Take a picture, kid, it’ll last longer.” LaRue Wingo’s voice had echoed off the tile floor when she’d caught me studying her breasts, turned up at the tips like sultan’s shoes, her figure as voluptuous as Marilyn Monroe’s.
“Yeah, it’s not polite to stare.” Kit turned to LaRue and the squadron commander’s wife nodded her approval.
Moe pulled me to her away from the laughing women and, with Kit and the twins,
we went out to the pool. My father stood in the middle and made Kit and me take turns swimming out to him. Kit was a good swimmer, but the trip across the vast pool took all my strength and courage. Halfway to my father, I inhaled a mouthful of water and my father had to pull me out. I felt as if I’d swum the English Channel.
I reach the gate, open it, and behold a pool hardly larger than one you’d find at a motel.
A little boy genuflects at the edge, his arms steepled over his head, ready to dive to the instructor waiting in the water. He is a skinny spider monkey like Bob, his stretch-waist swimsuit ballooning above skinny legs. The wives sunbathe on lounge chairs. They are all overweight. None of them reminds me of Marilyn Monroe.
As I walk back past the arched bridge and koi pond, I recalibrate my expectations and only partially succeed. I remember the Yokota Officers’ Club the way exiles remember Batista Cuba, as a nightclub of sophisticated, forbidden delights with a heavy emphasis on rattan. I can’t stop myself from feeling like an exile returning to Havana. The big letters YOC on the side of the building remain an acronym for glamour and sophistication. I can’t keep my heart from leaping as I walk into the shade of the porte cochere, just the way it did walking in with Moe and Captain Root.
No club should be viewed in daylight, and the Yokota Officers’ Club seems more forlorn than most. Inside the rattan has been replaced by molded plastic furniture. The rugs are worn, the paint is dingy. Only the smell is as I remember it: old beer, cigar smoke, floor wax, perfume, hair spray; filet mignons, onion rings, spiced red apple rings. Signs point the way to the Samurai Ballroom, the Terrace Café, and the Sho-Ichiban Restaurant.
Some magnetism left over from visits long past tugs me toward the Samurai Ballroom, the main dining room where my family always ate, but it is only open for dinner. The Sho-Ichiban is also closed. At the entrance to the Terrace Café, a full colonel sits high up in a shoe-polishing booth, reading a copy of the Yokota Afterburner and having the mirror finish on his shoes buffed by a white-haired Japanese man. The shoeshine man’s face has a wonderful burnished quality, like Moe’s big brass tray that she has polished beauty into over the years. His white hair is thick and spiky as a lion’s mane around his face. The sharp chemical smell of the black shoe edging he carefully paints around the sides of the colonel’s soles triggers a memory and the name Yoda Hayashi jumps into my mind, along with a memory of the man when his hair was more black than white.
