A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  With an odd mixture of dread and relief Satomi sees the telegraph boy—not a boy at all, but Mr. Stedall, who is forty if he is a day—appear in the small plot of garden at the back of the house.

  She taps Tamura lightly on the shoulder to draw her attention to his arrival. Tamura stands to face him, leaving the weeding they have been doing to keep busy, to keep the waiting at bay. Since Tamura won’t allow the possibility of Aaron’s death to be spoken of, despite that it is the text of their nightmares, the constant thought in their minds, they have run out of things to say to each other.

  “Sorry to give you this, Mrs. Baker,” Mr. Stedall says, offering the telegram. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Guess you know what it is.”

  Tamura looks toward the horizon as though something there, something far, far away, has caught her attention. She keeps her hands at her side, her body still. She has always liked Mr. Stedall, but the desire to please has left her, she can’t bring herself to smile.

  “Mrs. Baker …”

  She shakes her head, as though saying no, as though she can dismiss Mr. Stedall, he is an illusion, he isn’t really there, standing in her garden waving the telegram at her. She doesn’t want to touch the ugly thing, see the stupid words written, so that she has to believe them. She isn’t ready to give up on hope.

  Satomi, feeling a run of shame and pity at Tamura’s cowardice, takes the telegram from Mr. Stedall’s trembling hand. He moves away from her, looking at her inquisitively, as though she might be about to faint away, fall perhaps into his arms.

  “You can go now, Mr. Stedall,” she says quietly. “I’m guessing that you don’t need an answer.”

  A week or so after the telegram a letter from the Navy arrives. Satomi opens it, begins to read it out loud, but Tamura will have none of it.

  “Stop, I don’t want to hear it. Throw it away, Satomi. I know what I know.”

  “It’s the truth, Mama. You know it is.”

  But Tamura doesn’t want the truth. She wants sweet lies, the comfort of fantasy. The sight of the telegram had been bad enough, but somehow the letter, the leaf-thinness of it, the official Navy stamp, is worse. Taking to her bed, she buries herself under the sweaty shade of her sheets and attempts to fool herself into believing that Aaron is alive, that the knowing she talks about is real.

  With her mother out of it, Satomi rereads the letter with absolute attention to every word. It speaks of the Navy’s regret, says that Aaron had been a brave seaman who had lost his life in the defense of his country. Because so many had died that day, the Navy had to bury them quickly, laying them in death alongside the shipmates they had stood beside in life. The services had been dignified and each man had been named in them. Plot numbers and details would be sent to the families as soon as possible.

  She thinks of all the relatives of those who died alongside Aaron in the attack on the harbor, receiving the same letter. A thousand paper missiles with only the deceased’s names to distinguish one from another.

  She thinks of her father’s parents, whom she is not allowed to speak of. Do they know their son is dead, buried close to them in Hawaii? Probably not. Her mother must write to them when she feels better, it’s only fair.

  Bringing her father’s face to mind, the sound of his voice, she attempts tears for him, but there’s just a burning in her eyes, a lasso tightening in her chest. Her eyes water, not with the generous streams she owes him, but with bitter little salt courses that dry before they reach her cheeks.

  With Tamura lost in denial, she takes to running the place on her own. She feeds the hens, collects their eggs, cleans out the sheds, and makes a tasteless version of Tamura’s onion soup. She boils rice, beans, eggs, but Tamura refuses to eat. There is something dangerous in her mother’s rebuttal of food, something that threatens them both.

  Each morning she sits on the edge of Tamura’s bed, the letter in her hand, freshly made tea on the bedside table.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Tamura whines, putting her hands over her ears.

  “You must, Mama. You know you must.”

  “Why must I?”

  “Because it is right that you should. Because it’s childish not to.” She can’t help being irritated with Tamura. She is the mother, after all.

  Eventually the morning comes when Tamura, emerging from under the covers, is ready. Hunger has finally won out. She sips her tea, nibbles at a thin slice of toast, and watches Satomi take the letter from its envelope. Her eyes are shadowed and bloodshot, strands of her black hair are stuck to her forehead, she hasn’t washed for a week, and she smells musty. She looks a little mad.

  “Tell me again, why I must hear it?” she asks.

  “Because Father would want you to, because you are his wife, because it will comfort you. It says that Father was brave.”

  “I don’t need them to tell me that. I have always known it.”

  Remembering back to the day that Aaron had accidentally driven the prong of a pitchfork clean through his foot, leaving as he withdrew it a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece, Satomi knows that it is true too. He had been brave then as the blood pumped hot from his foot, concerned more for his wife, who couldn’t stop weeping as she had delicately cleaned and dressed the deep wound.

  “It’s a bit of blood, that’s all, nothing to fret about,” he had said, stroking Tamura’s hair, looking skeptical as she had applied a thick poultice of yarrow to the gaping gash. Catching her father’s eye, Satomi had cut her smile before Tamura saw it. Neither of them had much faith in her mother’s homemade remedies.

  The memory of that day, the three of them together in the warm kitchen, the way her father had given her a comforting wink, both healed and hurt. The wound had closed, but forever after Aaron had sported a red starburst of broken veins just above the joint of his smallest toe. And suddenly at last, with the thought of that scar being burned away, of Aaron being burned away, her tears come, taking her by surprise, falls of them that she can’t hold back.

  “I wish that I could have been a son for him,” she sobs to Tamura, who nods her head in what Satomi takes for agreement.

  Silently promising Aaron, wherever he might be, that she will always look after Tamura, she hopes with all her heart that in his last moments he hadn’t looked up and seen the red sun of Japan on the wings of the attacking planes. That he hadn’t at the end lost his love of things Japanese.

  In the days that follow Tamura’s revival, Satomi listens to the radio, attempting to engage with the world. It’s hard to know what to think about America being at war with Japan. She’s on America’s side, of course, but still that the enemy should be Japan, that her father’s murderers should be Japanese, is strange to think of.

  Despite the loss of Aaron, the reports of troops massing, the talk of our boys in uniform, it’s hard in her isolation to actually feel at war. It might be easier to accept if she could hear the sound of distant gunfire, if she had Lily and Artie to talk it over with, to be scared with.

  In the books she has read, war usually takes place on some distant plain, men’s stuff, the women left to wait and worry. Heroes rally in the thick of it, some come back to figure in their women’s lives, some like her father are lost from the plot. Now there’s no one left for her and Tamura to wait for. Impossible as it seems, their lives must go on without Aaron.

  They haven’t the energy for making new agendas. She refuses to go to school, but still the crops must be tended, the sheds kept in order, the hens fed. Birds still sing in the trees, there is no need to run for cover.

  Tamura now speaks of Japan as though it is a wicked relation that she is ashamed of. Japan has abandoned her, just as she now abandons it. Her loyalty to Aaron requires no less of her. Japan killed Aaron, it is beyond forgiveness.

  “Thank God I’m an American,” she says, as though to convince herself. “Thank God that we are an American family.”

  Satomi senses the conflict in her mother. Tamura is a child of both America and Japan. She is a demo
crat in the grasp of tradition, a Westerner with the blood of Japan in her veins.

  The fact that Aaron isn’t ever coming home, not even in a coffin, fights against the reality of his death. Still desperate for it not to be true, Tamura annoyingly continues to suggest unlikely possibilities.

  “He could have been wounded, not killed. He might have lost his memory, forgotten his name.”

  “No, that can’t be so, Mama. They buried Father, they had a service.”

  Tamura’s stubbornness is both pitiable and exasperating. Her mother’s insistence on hope when they both know that there is none seems unnervingly infantile to her. But Tamura’s stubbornness is not about accepting Aaron’s death any longer, it’s about putting life on hold for a while, about learning to accept a different future than the one she had planned with Aaron. It’s about the necessity she feels to stay loyal to who she was when Aaron was alive, to remain the American wife that he made her.

  Now that Aaron has gone she must launch herself into widowhood, something she has no idea how to do, something that holds only revulsion for her. She thinks of her mother, her papa, her brother, and knows now that she will never see them again. No matter how much it hurts, she will be true to Aaron. For as long as she lives she will never break their agreement. It will just be her and Satomi. They must be enough for each other now. But everything is a struggle, so that there are times when she feels as though she is suffocating.

  “I can’t breathe,” she wails. “It’s as though I’m drowning.”

  Satomi puts her arms around Tamura, holds her close until her mother calms and pulls away.

  “It will get better, Mama. It has to get better.”

  “It would help if someone would tell us how he died. I’m still waiting for someone to tell us whether he suffered or not.”

  They had heard about the burnings, the ships on fire, men and metal littering the water. How could he not have suffered?

  Satomi can hardly bear Tamura’s pain. Her smiling girlish mother has disappeared, perhaps for good. And it’s not so different for her. She has never been so sad or so scared herself. They are alone, haven’t spoken to anyone for days. Even Elena has stayed away, her absence serving to heighten their fears about going to town.

  “It will be Hal, not Elena,” Satomi consoles Tamura. “He’ll be on her case more than ever now.”

  Nothing and everything has changed. They work their way through the days, the same chores, the same fieldwork, an infestation of roaches that draws little emotion from them. They feel strangely empty, ghosts going about the business of the living.

  Tamura’s nightmares are so bad that she has begun to fear sleep. She screams out in them as though she is being burned up herself, so that Satomi runs to her, shaking her awake, bringing her back to a reality that is as hateful to her as her dreams.

  And then Mr. Stedall calls again with a letter from a man who had served alongside Aaron. Some of their questions are answered. Others, though, are posed that will never find an answer.

  Dear Mrs. Baker,

  I hope that it is okay me writing you. My name is Milton Howley, Milt for short. I don’t want to stir things up but I thought that you would want to know how Aaron was at the end. I worked alongside him in the ship’s kitchen and I guess that you could say we were friends. He was a pretty good cook and had a good sense of humor.

  I was on shore about to return to the ship when the attack happened, so I was saved. Guess I was luckier than most that day. Anyway, I met the nurse who treated him on the dock, and she was of the opinion that I should write and tell you that he didn’t suffer.

  Aaron was blasted into the drink in the first wave of the attack. One of those Jap bombs set fire to our magazine and sunk our ship like a stone. I reckon he must have been unconscious before he was fished out of the water. The nurse I spoke of treated his burns with tannic jelly, but I think that he had already gone by then. So you see he couldn’t have known much about it.

  Only the officers were sent home to their families for burial, so Aaron was buried in Oahu Cemetery along with his shipmates in a very fine service. There’s a cross with his name marking the plot, so it won’t be hard to find when you come. Some of the locals put flowers from their gardens on the graves, red poinsettias and hibiscus I’m told. I’m not much of a plant man myself but I thought that you might want to know that. Aaron was a good buddy and I will miss him, not more than you and your daughter Elena of course, but I sure will miss him. I’m clear in my mind that we’ll make those lousy Japs pay for what they did, have no fears on that score.

  I pray for you both.

  Respectfully yours

  Milton Howley

  “Elena! His daughter Elena! Why would Father have said that?”

  “ ‘Lousy Japs’?” Tamura shakes her head in disbelief. “Didn’t Aaron tell him I am Japanese?” She gave a soft little mewl at the thought of being denied by Aaron.

  “I guess not.” Satomi kisses Tamura’s cheek, her forehead. “Perhaps it was easier for him that way, Mama. What with all the talk and bad feeling around.”

  “I thought that he was proud of us.”

  “He wasn’t ashamed of us. You know he wasn’t ashamed of us. It was probably just less hassle for him that way.”

  “I wanted to call you Elena, you know, but he wouldn’t have it.” Tamura is wailing now. “He was firm that it had to be a Japanese name. He wanted it to be a Japanese name.”

  “There you are, then, Mama. It must have been just a way for him to get through. You know how mean people can be.”

  But in explaining it away to Tamura, she can’t understand it herself. Aaron’s denial of her name, of her, makes her question if she ever really knew him. For her father, of all people, to hide his Japanese family from his white shipmates went against everything she had always believed him to be.

  No matter that she and Tamura agree that Milt Howley hadn’t really known Aaron, that he couldn’t have been a close friend, the hurt of it won’t go away. The thought of it wakes her in the night, wounds her throughout the day.

  “For one thing,” Tamura says, outraged, “your father never mentioned this Milt person in his letters, and I think that this ‘good cook, good sense of humor’ proves that they were never really close. I loved your father, but no one who knew him could say that he had a good sense of humor.”

  “No, you’re right. Father never saw the funny side of things.”

  Neither of them wants to go on questioning who it is that they have lost, who it is that they are grieving for. They dredge up every memory of Aaron that they can and improve on it. While they are holding in mind the good husband that he had been, he is becoming in legend the good father that he had not been.

  “Saint Aaron,” Satomi says under her breath, without malice.

  She has begun to care for her mother in the knowledge that she is the stronger of the two, but not strong enough, she thinks. It’s no fun being in charge, she wants her old mother back. Under Tamura’s steel-rimmed spectacles her eyes have lost their light, they are like dull little buttons. She looks but doesn’t see. She hardly smiles at all these days, and she won’t talk about the future.

  “Let’s be still for a while, Satomi. Live quietly in the day.”

  But since the day that those of her mother’s blood had killed her father, the future looms as never before. She is full of fear for what might be ahead of them. Despite what happened to Aaron, no doubt they are outcasts now. Both are nervous about testing the water in town.

  “It may not be so bad, Mama. And we can’t hide out here forever.”

  Satomi doesn’t feel as brave as she sounds. She doesn’t believe Angelina will allow her to be the daughter of a hero, and they won’t accept Tamura as the wife of one, that’s for sure. Aaron’s death, she thinks, will weigh light on the scales against the guilt of Tamura’s race.

  Rising at first light, going to bed with the dark, they are eager after the day to be out of each other’s company, to
stop for a few hours the pretense that they can continue as they are. They never discuss whether they can run the farm profitably without Aaron, whether they should sell up and find a new way to live.

  “I’ve finished with school, thank God,” Satomi insists, hoping that Tamura might find the parent in herself and encourage her to return.

  “That’s fine, Satomi. You’re grown-up now, I guess.”

  After years of wanting it she longs now not to be grown-up, to be instead a helpless child, to have decisions made for her. But even in the face of their need Tamura seems incapable of action. They are running out of everything, living on hen eggs and their dwindling supply of rice.

  “At least we still have eggs,” Tamura says disinterestedly.

  The hens, though, as if they know Tamura has given up on them, have taken to laying sporadically, and some days not at all.

  “Even your cockerel can hardly be bothered to crow,” Satomi says.

  “They’re not used to you, that’s all,” Tamura says. “It’s no good just throwing the feed at them, you have to talk to them, encourage them.”

  “They want you back, Mama. They’ll start laying again as soon as they hear your voice.”

  She herself misses the sweet bell of Tamura’s voice singing the nursery songs of her childhood to her farmyard audience.

  Neither of them can bear the idea of wringing a neck or two for the pot.

  “Your father always said he couldn’t understand it. Two squeamish farm girls. But I just can’t do it. Those surprised little eyes, their warm feathers. I just can’t.”

  “We’re too soft,” Satomi says in despair.

  If they needed an excuse not to go to town, it comes in the form of Elena summoning them on the horn of Hal’s truck, calling to them from the passenger seat, the bulk of Hal restless at the wheel.

  “Give it a week or two, Tamura. People ain’t making much sense at the moment. You’re better off at home.”

  Satomi moves toward the truck. “Can you buy us some rice, some flour, Elena?”