by Sarah Bird
The other crews hooted out laughing protests while Dub Coulter struck muscleman poses and Patsy Dugan waggled his ass for the other fliers to kiss. Major Wingo clasped his hands above his blond head like a winning prizefighter and my father grinned a grin that was not his real one. When the hooting stopped and Madge started reading again, Major Wingo and my father glanced at each other, then looked away quickly.
“We do hereby offer this evening’s entertainment in honor of the Thirty-eighty-first’s ten years of service to the United States of America, far above and far, far beyond the call of duty!”
The men whooped and whistled through two fingers. LaRue, delighted that the words everyone knew she had written were being so well received, grinned with open pleasure.
“And now, to express what we all feel, the Biloxi Bombshell herself, LaRue Wingo!”
As rehearsed, the band launched into the theme from the LP of the new Broadway show The Stripper. Major Wingo led the applause. My father joined in, pounding his palms together as a spotlight found LaRue. Though neither of us could see my father’s gaze in the darkness, we could both feel it. Moe patted her hands together woodenly. LaRue stood in the spotlight beside her table, her eyes wide as if surprised by this tribute and uncertain how to react.
Moe rolled her eyes in disgust.
LaRue finally strode onto the stage, her wicked-queen cape billowing behind. With a lingering coyness that verged on striptease, she slid off the hood, untied the velvet cords at the neck, and let the heavy cape fall to the floor as if it were being pulled off by an unseen hand. Whoops and catcalls greeted the low-cut, backless, sequined gown she revealed. She took the microphone with a polished professionalism, swirling her hand high above the stand like a witch casting a spell as she unwound the cord.
LaRue sang “Besame Mucho” with a throbbing sensuality, writhing in a pantomime of desire. Though she could impersonate a woman with an itch, her imitation of a woman with a good singing voice was far less convincing. Moe winced every time the commander’s wife bottomed out, growling over the low notes she missed and searching for the high ones. By the time LaRue hit the refrain, Moe was signaling the waitress for refills of her White Russian and my father’s vodka tonic, which she had finished. When the drinks were delivered, Moe slammed them both back like she had a deadline to meet.
She was throwing down another round of refills when LaRue finished with an impassioned plea for many, many kisses, then drooped at the waist, spent, as applause washed over her. Revived by the shower of attention, she stood, arms to the heavens, tawny mane thrown back.
Madge bounced onstage, clapping and fluffing up the air in front of her, exhorting the crowd to their last round of applause before LaRue exited to the covey waiting to congratulate her on her triumph. The houselights came back on. Madge replaced the microphone on its stand.
“That was our own squadron commander’s wife, the very talented and lovely LaRue Wingo!”
A new wave of applause crested. LaRue looked around at her subjects with actual tears glistening in her eyes.
“Wow, LaRue,” Madge enthused woodenly. “I guess everyone wants to hear another as much as I do. You think you got one more for us?”
The band members leaned forward to pull out the sheet music LaRue had provided for her encore.
As LaRue touched her chest, miming surprise and checking to be sure that it was “Me? You want me?” Moe put her glass down, whisked a bit of lint from the front of her dress, and stood up. Odd, usually one drink had Moe wobbling, her cheeks flaming red, but all the alcohol she’d consumed that night seemed to have steadied her. Her face was porcelain, cool and immobile. I prayed she wouldn’t open her mouth, but she did.
“I’ve got one for you.”
My gaze skittered nervously to my father, hoping he would do something to end the agony of the attention my mother had caused to descend upon me. He stood at the bar, his drink raised in a frozen gesture. Slowly, as if he could erase what he was seeing, my father closed his eyes. When he reopened them to see his wife advancing unsteadily toward the stage, he belted back his drink in one gulp.
The wives who’d clustered around LaRue pinballed glances of consternation and contempt back and forth.
Moe stopped at their table. “This is supposed to be a show by all the wives for all the guys, isn’t it?” she asked the women. “Well, I’m a wife.”
She sailed past them, past LaRue and right onto the stage. Madge Coulter held the microphone out like a club ready to ward off my mother’s advance. Moe disarmed her in one lurching motion.
I put my head down and melted into a puddle of burning shame. The gazes, the judgments strafing my mother had annihilated me. It was me onstage and I was naked. There was no death so horrible that I would not happily choose it over continuing to exist as the charred cinder of humiliation my mother had turned me into.
A skirl of microphone noise caused me to lift my eyes a few micrometers and see Moe covering the mike with her hand while she conferred with the bandleader. The wives offered their smirks to LaRue at my mother’s amateurish mike technique. LaRue received the smirks with an old pro’s expression of patient forbearance for the upstart’s gaucheries. I thought longingly of the picture of Saint Sebastian in my missal, eyes cast heavenward, his breast pierced by a dozen arrows.
“I’d like to dedicate this song”—my mother’s amplified voice was a waterfall gushing out, a flood I would never be able to bottle back up or mop away—“to Fumiko Tanaguchi.”
I drowned in her words, and still the waters rose.
“And to all of us who’ve kept our mouths shut for too goddamned long.”
I chewed on the inside of my lip, hoping to open a wound that would allow me to quietly bleed to death without attracting any further attention as Moe began to sing. Blood thundered in my head so loudly I couldn’t hear her.
Mercifully, the house lights dimmed. I risked raising my head. A spotlight bleached my mother. At first glance, she appeared only as patches of dark hair and red lips floating in a dazzling radiance. It was an X-ray vision of Moe far worse than if she’d been naked. Still no sound reached my brain, and I could only watch the grotesque pantomime of my mother on a stage pretending to be a singer.
When, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the men, all from the other crews, moving up, I was certain they were coming, like the angry villagers in Frankenstein, to pull Moe down and poke at her with their torches. Their grins, the obvious pleasure they were taking in this mission, shocked me. I was so startled when the men halted at the foot of the stage that, for a second, the blood stopped pounding in my ears long enough for me to hear my mother’s voice. I didn’t believe what I heard. Moe was singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Of all the hideous twists this night had taken, this was the worst, my mother putting herself up for comparison with Judy Garland.
But Moe didn’t sing Judy Garland’s song. Instead, when she sang about a land in a lullaby and waking up where clouds are far behind, when she begged to know why, oh why, she couldn’t fly beyond the rainbow, it amazed me to hear that she was singing about that place where I was blond and had a cocker spaniel and lots of friends and never had to move ever again and be the new girl.
I was embarrassed at Moe telling everyone my dream until I looked around and saw the men in the other crews and their wives, their heads tilted up as if they were about to receive communion, staring at Moe the way the crowds of little girls that swarmed around Kit stared at her. The way sobbing teenagers stared at Elvis.
As she sang, the men saw again the Charles Lindbergh sky of their boyhoods. They saw the shimmering white canvas that would contain the infinite stretch of their bravery, their heroism, their dreams. The wives saw once more the hope of flying into a future of limitless promise and bold adventures. A future beyond mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, beyond hometowns that suffocated and stunted. As Moe sang they all remembered again the dream of making a home in the sky.
&nbs
p; Why then oh why can’t I?
The song ended. Moe dropped her head, and there was utter silence. When she looked back up, her face was wet with tears. She cocked her head to the side in a gesture that said, “Well, that’s it. That’s my song,” and the Samurai Ballroom exploded. Hands pounded together, men put fingers in their mouths and whistled, wives from the other crews fished in evening bags for wads of Kleenex to dab at their eyes. They screamed for an encore, but Moe walked off the stage, past my father, and straight out the back door of the club.
The guys from the other crews crowded around my father, asking him how he managed to catch such a songbird. Was she a professional? She sure sounded like a professional. I searched for LaRue, for a glimpse of her face, but her seat was empty.
My father told me to get Kit and go to the car. I finally found Kit, asleep on the damp cushions of a chaise longue by the pool.
“Did you hear Mom sing?” I asked her, as we walked through the parking lot.
“What?” Kit wasn’t cranky, which meant she wasn’t really awake yet. I took her hand and led her to the car, where she curled up in the backseat and slept on, never knowing that that night our mother had mopped the floor of the Yokota Officers’ Club with LaRue Wingo.
Candied Tangerine
The same OSI colonel and the same APs who’d told the families on the Flight Line that the crew wasn’t coming in woke us up at four the next morning.
They took us to the BOQ on Tachikawa. We weren’t allowed to speak to anyone. We were each permitted to bring only one small bag apiece. We had to leave everything else behind, even Chisaii.
Three days later, our father got his orders. None of us could find out where we were going because, every time we asked, he would answer, “Bunhump, East Jesus.”
My parents’ anger was too large for the small room we all shared and so buried in the secrets of my father’s work that, sometime around then, they lost the habit of talking to each other.
Kit and I turned to the Ouija board to try and find out what the name of our new home was to be, but all it would give us was the first letter, Y, which Kit said was only because I pushed it that way since I wanted to stay at Yokota so badly.
Our new assignment was Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Months later, when we unpacked, our hairbrush was clotted with dried toothpaste because the tube left open in the bathroom had been thrown in the same box. Another box contained everything that had been on the dining room table that last night. The tablecloth was stained and sprinkled with the dried petals from a vase of snapdragons that had been packed, water and all, on top of it. Dried scrambled eggs were shellacked to the dinner plates Fumiko had used to serve the meal she’d prepared for the twins and Bosco while we were at the club. On the last dirty plate Moe pulled from that box were shriveled bits of candied tangerine, a hard shell of sugar crystallized around each leathery section. Moe started crying, threw the plate away, went to her room, closed the door, and didn’t come out even when we all pounded on the door and said we were hungry.
Our abrupt departure from Yokota was never explained, never discussed. Fumiko’s name was never mentioned again. In time it became natural—convenient—to put the two together and blame Fumiko not only for our exile but for everything that followed.
Our father’s predictions all came true. Everyone in his crew except him was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the last mission. He never was sent to Staff and Command College. We never stayed anywhere much longer than a year. And he never flew again.
Spiced Apple
I push open the swinging doors of the Samurai Ballroom. For a second, I almost expect to see the banners proclaiming, WELCOME HOME BOYS!! and 3081ST: TEN YEARS OF VALOR that had hung there the last time I stepped into this room. But there are no banners. There’s not even any rattan furniture or banquettes covered in raw silk. They’ve been replaced by Formica tables with steel-frame chairs and booths covered in burgundy vinyl occupied by couples in dress-up clothes.
The wives, hair sculpted into glossy helmets, eyes shadowed in aqua, mascaraed lashes curled up into right angles, perch on girdled butts. Their husbands wear suits they had made in Hong Kong from fabrics that looked good in the tailor shop but haven’t worn well, have grown shabby and tight. Lines of fragile tension string between the couples as the wives flick shadowed eyes from their plates to their husbands and the husbands scan the room, checking out the other officers. Nowhere is there any evidence of the swaggering Rat Pack cool of my father and his crew.
Bobby works his way through the crowd, shaking a hand here, pounding a back there. A one-star general is installed at the best table in the room. Bobby pretends to go rigid with fear in front of him, snapping off a salute that vibrates with terror at his forehead as Bobby shoots pop-eyed grimaces around the laughing room. Finally, the general returns the salute to a round of applause. He has the cowboy cocky manner of Coney Wingo and doesn’t look any older than my father.
Bobby bounds onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the general! There’s one man who wants to die with his boots on. He’s got holes in his socks! His family has always served the country—some of them ten years, some of them twenty. All right, all right, I can see that most of you agree with his proctologist, we’ve seen enough of this asshole! Come on, let’s hear it for the general. A good sport, a good sport.”
A table of stag guys at the back leads the crowd in whoops of laughter that verge into braying insubordination, and eyes carom from the general to the men. I recognize the TDY crew I saw earlier in the day, picking up wives at the Terrace Café. Some of the men, including the redheaded major, seem to have succeeded. Several wives sit with them.
The room is with Bobby, laughing, grinning, from table to table. “You know why we’re in Vietnam, don’t you?” He asks the crowd, and I feel the tug of them slipping away from him like the tide pulling sand from underfoot. But Bobby doesn’t seem to notice. “It’s the only country in the world where the women come out to meet you in pajamas! It’s called Operation Headstart!”
Bah-bing!
He gets a rim shot but very few laughs. The very last thing the diners at the Yokota Officers’ Club want to be reminded of that particular night is Vietnam. Bobby, oblivious, plunges on.
“Yeah, I just got back from a tour of Nam. Nice country. They got two seasons there, rainy and dry. I missed the dry season. That was the day before. It was so damp I couldn’t tell whether the men were applauding or splashing. It wasn’t that bad. Next time I go back I may even sleep on top of the bed. But, seriously, I don’t see what all this protest stuff is about. All this burning the draft cards. I just heard the government’s got a new policy. If they’re old enough to play with matches, they’re old enough to be drafted. You’ve seen some of these guys with the shoulder-length hair. I guess they’d rather switch than fight.”
In the silence that follows, forks clatter against plates. I could have told Bobby this bit would bomb. Women in pajamas, longhaired draft protesters, a war in a rainy country where Americans are killed in their beds, it is both too real and completely unimaginable.
“Hey, someone forgot to tell me I’d be playing the Far East Morticians Convention tonight!”
At the back of the room, I touch the lacquered pillar of my hair, press my girdled toes against the go-go boots, and try to activate the nervousness I should be feeling. It is hard, however, to unwind the tentacles of memory that still grip me and recall that, within a matter of minutes, I am supposed to take the place of the stubby, sweating man onstage. I can’t stop returning to the image of Moe singing, as if the memory were a room I’d just discovered in a house where I’d lived a long time. Again and again, I sort back through the years of my parents’ silence. I shuffle in Fumiko’s story, the secrets my father was burdened with, the secrets I knew, the secrets I told.
The Japanese drummer hits a belated exclamation point to Bobby’s joke. The tinny clatter of the cymbals echoes hollowly in the room.
“Oh, someone’s alive out there. Thanks, Yosh. That’s Yoshi Gottaweewee. Yosh don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t curse and never made a pass at a girl. He also sews all his own gowns.”
Bobby gets a few pained smiles.
“Okay, you don’t like me. You don’t like Yosh, let’s bring on Okinawa’s answer to Joey Heatherton, the Amazing Zelda!”
The band, cued by Bobby, launches into “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.”
I walk through the ballroom toward the stage. The familiar red rings of spiced apple sit like bull’s eyes on white dinner plates. My strange detachment continues even as I hobble on the tight boots up the three steps to the stage. My heart pounds with nervousness, but I can’t force my mind back into the present. I am so distracted that I forget to take my glasses off. At the center of the stage, I look out and see what Moe saw eight years ago: grim faces set into expressions of resentment enlivened only by the hope of witnessing a true catastrophe.
A dim impulse causes me to attempt motion in time to the music. The result is a lurching afterthought committed while my attention is spent studying the faces watching me. They are the faces of my father and his crew. The glamorous RAF boys and their wives eight, ten, twelve years on. The men and women who, like my father, like Moe, in the imperial glow cast by World War II, pledged their lives to deliver the sky from America’s enemies in return for a promise to be their nation’s heroes. I have seen their futures, I know the disappointment that awaits them back in their native land, and I am overwhelmed by tenderness for these remote men and their girdled women.
I wave at the band to stop bleating out this false proclamation about my “digging” rock ’n’ roll. I am a visitor from the future. I am the only one of this tribe, my tribe, who knows that they have been overtaken by history. That none of the promises they based their lives on will ever be fulfilled. I unzip the white go-go boots and my bare feet explode out. By the time I straighten up, I’ve pulled most of the pins out of my hair. For a second, half a can of hair spray allows the structure to defy gravity, before it falls in shellacked clumps around my face. The very least I can give my tribe is the truth about the country they will return to, the truth about their children, the truth about me.
