A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  Back in her room, she picks up her hairbrush and starts to count, tugging the bristles through her hair, creating knots where there had been none, until her scalp burns with the force of it. She is aiming for a hundred but knows by the time she reaches twelve that she isn’t going to make it. It hurts that there are things in life that she doesn’t have a hold on, that she is out of the loop, way out.

  Damn them all, she would go to the tap, do what she wants. Passing a moth that has fluttered to the floor seeking out the cooler air, she stamps on it with her bare foot. The sticky feel of its innards on her skin is revolting. She lets out an “Aargh” of disgust. Something close to remorse stirs in her.

  The run of rusty water comes warm at first, then deliciously cool. It feels good being out in the dark yard, angry enough not to care if Aaron hears and comes after her. It hurts, though, that she is nobody’s girl, that she is alone in the world.

  Unable to keep from her mind the picture of her parents together in theirs, she scrubs at her skin, the skin that Lily says shines like gasoline. Lily has a cruel streak, but she never bucks the truth, you have to give her that. She kicks the tap and hears it creak.

  Her parents’ room, like her own, has always seemed ordinary to her, but this night it has become another place entirely, a shining mystical place, exclusive to them. Vivid in every detail, it’s a picture she can’t shake from her mind, her mother’s silk robe carelessly spilled around the bed, their shadows moving on the wall, the little cloud of cluster flies bombing the candle, and the dark starless sky soft beyond the open window. It’s their heated night, their hooting owl, their everything. She is overcome with childish jealousy.

  Next morning, as she passes their room, she sees that the curtains are drawn against the light, the bed made, everything neat and tidy as usual, but somehow not as usual. Her mother’s silk robe, the one with pink butterflies embroidered on it, is folded now across the chair. For the first time she notices that there are dark little moths scattered here and there among the butterflies. She doesn’t like them.

  With newly critical eyes, she sees the patched bedspread, the peeling paintwork, and the motes of dust like fireflies in the air. Nothing feels familiar anymore. Her world has shifted somehow, as though some small link from her senses to her brain has been broken.

  “Damn—damn—damn,” she curses. “It’s too damned hot.”

  At breakfast she is sullen, out of sorts. Her father has already left for the fields; she must have slept later than usual.

  “Guess I’m in trouble with him again, huh?” she says sulkily.

  For once Tamura doesn’t rush to Aaron’s defense. “You slept well, Satomi, that’s good. You’ve been sleeping so badly lately.”

  She tries to ignore her mother’s sweet smile, but it has already caused a small fracture in her heart. Still, she isn’t ready to be placated.

  “Can’t say I slept that well. Nobody’s gonna get much sleep around here until this damned weather breaks.”

  “Please, Satomi, don’t curse, you know your father won’t have cursing in the house.”

  Hurt by her daughter’s mood, Tamura turns from her, busying herself with making her ocha, the green tea that reminds her of home. She is fragile when it comes to love, has never resigned herself to the ups and downs of family life. As a child she had taken every little slight to heart, and nothing much has changed in the years since. Aaron knows it, so he is careful around her, gathering her up in her injured moments, telling her boastfully that she is safe with him.

  “You take too much to heart,” he says. “Don’t let people get to you so easily.”

  He can’t bear to see her hurt, wants to protect her from everything that the rotten world throws at her. She is the flower on the dung heap, the only pure thing he knows. And she has given up everything to be with him, a man she might never have met had he not one day by mistake taken her brother’s bicycle from outside her family’s grocery store in the suburbs of Honolulu.

  When he returned it with the briefest of apologies, he saw Tamura in all her acquiescent beauty, lowered eyes, soft voice, and knew that he must have her.

  She saw a big blue-eyed American, golden-haired and smelling sweetly of milk, and knew that he would. In an instant, Hawaii and the life she lived with her family became secondary to her need to respond to Aaron’s call.

  Putting down a larger than usual portion of the morning breakfast rice in front of Satomi, Tamura smiles forgivingly.

  “The storm is sure to break soon.” She touches her daughter’s shining hair, notices the dark beneath her eyes, the way she won’t look at her.

  “I don’t want asagohan. I want an American breakfast.”

  “I will make you eggs. It will only take a minute. Sometimes I feel like an American breakfast too.”

  “I’m bringing Lily back after school, Mother. We’re paired up on a nature assignment,” Satomi lies, hoping to annoy.

  “Oh, Satomi, that’s not a good idea. You know your father doesn’t like Lily.”

  “He doesn’t like anyone.”

  “Well—that’s not— Anyway, you know what I mean.”

  And she did, they both knew that Aaron didn’t care to know folks. When Tamura had taken him home to meet her parents, she had despaired at his off hand manner, his lack of desire to impress. They had known that their families would disapprove, had known since childhood the divide, where they were expected to draw the line between their races. But Aaron could have tried, might have made an effort.

  For Tamura’s parents, though, it hadn’t so much been a dislike of Aaron that had angered them, but of the idea of their daughter marrying out of her race, her culture. Her mother couldn’t believe that she would do such a thing, and had beaten her for even considering it.

  “White boys are fine as friends, but not to marry. You are Japanese, be proud of it. If you do this we will all be lost to you. You will not be welcome in your own home. Your father will never speak to you again. Just think of it, a daughter not able to be in her father’s presence, the disgrace of it might kill you.”

  Tamura did think of it. But she couldn’t believe that her papa wouldn’t come to love Aaron as she did. It hurt her beyond measure when, in the days before she left home to join Aaron, her father neither spoke to nor looked at her.

  Aaron’s mother, an unforgiving woman of harsh judgments, had snarled that the shame of him marrying a Jap was something she would never be able to live down.

  “They’re our cane-cutters, we don’t marry them.”

  “Well, she’s sweeter than our sugar, Ma. So get used to it, we’re getting married.”

  “Can’t say our family is perfect, Aaron, but none of them have ever sunk so low as to marry a Jap. Good God, boy, you’ll be speaking pidgin next.”

  He saw the disgust on her face, suppressed the urge to slap her. “I reckon I’m getting the better of the deal, Ma.”

  “You’ve just been taken in by a pretty face, that’s all. I’m telling you now, Aaron, that I don’t care to know any half-and-half grandchildren. The truth is I just couldn’t bring myself to touch them.”

  The idea to leave Hawaii had been Aaron’s. Tamura, with her family’s back turned to her, had agreed to it; if their people wouldn’t accept them, they would give them up and set out in life as though newborn. They would let go both family and religion, his Christian, hers Buddhist, and be enough in everything for each other.

  “We’ll make the same sacrifices,” he said. “That way we won’t be able to blame each other in the future. We don’t need anyone but ourselves to get along.”

  But equal as it seemed, it was not the same sacrifice. For Tamura it fought against her obedient nature and was all pain. The letting go of her family inflicted a wound that would never heal. Yet without knowing why, Aaron was pleased to do it. He walked away as though he had from the first been a cuckoo in the alien nest of his parents’ home. He walked away a free man.

  They had married in a civil cere
mony, with strangers for witnesses, and had instantly left Hawaii for California, where Aaron used his savings to buy ten acres of Depression-cheap land on the outskirts of the small town of Angelina.

  “Your father never looked back, but sometimes I still cry for my mother,” Tamura told Satomi. “Love makes you do things that you never thought you were capable of.”

  But Satomi thought their desertion of their families heartless. If they needed only each other, where did that leave her?

  The eggs are cooked just as she likes them, but as usual Tamura has made too many and she can’t finish them. In any case it is too hot to eat, too hot to think, even.

  “Don’t bring Lily home,” Tamura pleads. “No point in stirring up trouble.”

  Aaron thinks Lily sly, says that he doesn’t like the way she looks down her nose at people.

  “Don’t know what she thinks she’s got that makes her better than us. A scrawny scrap of a thing like her.”

  Satomi had rushed to the protection of her friendship with Lily.

  “She’s my best friend, Father. She’s the only one who doesn’t mind being friends with a Jap.”

  “I’ve warned you about that word before. I don’t want to hear it from you ever again.”

  Jap, Jap, Jap, she had repeated in her mind, feeling heartsick.

  Neither the eggs nor Tamura’s pandering satisfy. She can’t shake the feeling that her mother has betrayed her in some way, that she has shown herself to be an unreliable ally. Yet once out of the house, try as she might to hold on to it, her bad mood drifts away on the little breeze that fetches up a half a mile or so from the school house.

  She senses it first on the nape of her neck, a delicious lick on the run of red where the sun has found her out. Walking backward, so that it’s fresh on her face, she doesn’t hear the distant thunder, but the faint smell of metal in the air tells her that at last the storm is coming. Aaron as usual has gotten it right.

  She lingers at the roadside waiting for it, not caring that it will make her late. The light is eerie now, a hoary gray, the sun hunkered behind the clouds. And then the first drops fall big as pebbles, soaking her through so that her nipples and the line of her panties can be seen through the thin cotton of her dress.

  In the cool air that follows the downpour her body seems to reconnect with her mind, and, being her father’s daughter, her own immediate concerns take over. She tells herself that she doesn’t care about anything, doesn’t care about being on the outside, about being a Jap, about not being blond. But suddenly she is restless, can’t wait to grow up, to pursue whatever that intimate thing is that is between her parents. She wants a magical room of her own, territory to feel included in.

  School is out of the question. She can’t be bothered to spar with kids who are little more than babies compared to her. Her teacher, Mr. Beck will raise his eyes at yet another absence. He won’t mark it in the truant book, though, she knows that; knows it like she pretends not to know that he stares at her in lessons, lolling back in his chair, wetting his lips with his long pale tongue.

  She’ll go skinny-dipping in the river, feel the weeds between her toes. There will be nobody to spy on her at this time of day. She’ll wade out to where there’s still a bit of deep and submerge herself. After, she will lie on the sandy bank, light up, and practice blowing smoke rings.

  In the years that followed the burning summer, Satomi glimpsed no other life on the horizon for herself.

  “It’s the same boring old road,” she complained to Lily. “No bends or corners to turn, no surprises ahead, just straight on.”

  “Same old, same old,” Lily agreed.

  Satomi read and read, and laughed and argued with Lily, and fought her enemies, and attempted through her behavior not to be Mr. Beck’s favorite. She swam alone in the river, slipping under the deep water, holding her breath until she felt like bursting. She hid from her father’s demands in the pine woods with her book and her roll-up cigarettes.

  Life was marked only by the smallest of things. A surprising flurry of snow one January, followed by a summer of glut that didn’t please Aaron; too many tomatoes on the market meant the price went low and set his mood to match. And once, as she slept, an earth tremor came in the night and cracked their windows, putting Tamura’s hens in a panic. But small concerns aside, the road went on, straight for as far as the eye could see.

  Toward her fourteenth birthday she started her monthly bleeds and was told by Tamura that she was a woman now. It didn’t feel like it to her. She still had to go to school, still had to dance to Aaron’s tune.

  Her first bra came around the same time as the bleeding and, seeing it hanging on the line, Aaron teased that it looked like a catapult for peanuts. She never hung it where he could see it again.

  Her first kiss came too. Tom Broadbent, a boy with lizard eyes and an uninhibited nature, pushed her up against the school wall and pressed his dry lips to hers for a second or two. She had thought kissing would be better than that, something soft and tingly, something delicious, something like nothing else.

  “He kisses everyone,” Lily said contemptuously, jealous that on both counts, bra and kiss, Satomi had gotten there first.

  Among Angelina’s large white community, its small Japanese one, there is no one like her, no other half-and-half in the area. She’d ditch the Japanese half if she could. It takes the shine off how great it is to be an American somehow. The thought that she might be the only one in the world is too scary to think about. Lily says that there must be others the same, though.

  “Don’t get to thinking you’re an original, Sati. Sure to be some like you in the city.”

  “Guess you’re right, Lily. Guess nobody’s a one-off.”

  What would she do without Lily telling it as it is? Lily’s the reason she doesn’t play truant more often, Lily and the fact that school’s not so bad. At least it’s an escape from her rule-bound home, a place to be disobedient in without feeling she’s hurting her mother.

  While slavishly following Satomi’s bad habits, Lily thinks herself an original, a cut above the rest. Satomi thinks her fine too, and together they revel in being the risky girls, the ones who took up smoking first—took to cursing like the boys. The schoolyard rings with cursing. “Fuck” is the boys’ favorite; “damn,” the girls’.

  If Mr. Beck catches them at it, the punishment is ten strokes with a brass-edged ruler on the palm of the hand. The devilish thing inflicts sooty blood blisters where the corner of it whips at the skin. Satomi wears hers like a badge of honor.

  “Hey, Satomi, who gave you those love bites?” the boys taunt her.

  “Come over here and get some more, I’ve never tasted a Jap.”

  “With a face like yours you never will.” She’s sewn up tight against their calls, too tight to let a bunch of no-hopers unstitch her.

  There’s one, though, whom she isn’t immune to, so that on a truant afternoon lazing by the river, when the heat had seeped into her brain, turning her thoughts to mush, when even the birds seemed to be sleeping, she let Artie Goodwin, the best-looking boy in the school, get to second base with her.

  In a torment of jealousy over Artie and not knowing her advice was already too late, Lily set down the rules for Satomi in a voice of doom.

  “Don’t let him get past first base,” she ordered, staring Satomi feverishly in the eye. “That’s just kissing. I guess that can’t do much harm. Second base is kissing and touching over clothes, that’s okay if you are going steady, which you aren’t, are you?”

  “Could if I wanted, Lily.”

  “Well, whatever, third base is out of bounds. They want to kiss and touch you under your clothes, ugh! Anyway, if you let them do it, it means you’re a tramp.”

  “I can guess what a home run is.”

  “Home run is sex. Never allow a boy a home run, it could ruin you for life.”

  Lily’s cousin Dorothy had allowed Davey Cromer a home run, and he had bolted when she got pregnant.<
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  “Everyone knew that Dorothy wasn’t good enough for him,” Lily said. “His family being the biggest pea growers in the area an all. And that’s no more than the truth.”

  Dorothy is the bogeyman in Lily’s family, held up to the girls to show them what will happen if they let their morals lapse.

  “Anyway, Sati, I don’t know what you see in Artie, he’s always strutting around like the ‘big I am,’ and you’re not the only one he flirts with.”

  “Yeah, maybe so, but he sure is good-looking, you have to agree.”

  “I guess. If you like the pretty-boy type.”

  Lily tries not to let her jealousy show on her face. Satomi Baker is supposed to be her best friend, after all. She doesn’t want people thinking that Sati has won the prize that she’s desperate for herself.

  “Guess you two ain’t such good friends as you thought, eh, Lily?” smirk the girls whose friendship she has shunned. She hates that they know, in that way that girls know, that she’s keen on Artie herself.

  It’s her own fault, she guesses. She chose Satomi as her best friend with the idea of showing everyone that she was something pretty special herself. Lily Morton isn’t one to follow the herd. You can’t tell her what to do. Truth is, though, she wishes she had never set eyes on Satomi. Satomi is hard work, and now the worst has happened and Satomi has Artie. If only Artie hadn’t been so cute, so curly-haired and fondant-lipped, she wouldn’t ache so.

  “Guess he likes Japs,” the girls jeer. “Why else would he favor her over you, Lily?”

  “Sex, for sure.” She hadn’t been able to stop herself from saying it. Well, it was no more than the truth, boys were always out for sex, and Artie knew he wouldn’t get a sniff at it with a respectable girl like her. Never mind that she pouts her lips and crosses her legs in that come-and-get-it way whenever he glances at her.