A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  “Sorry, Mrs. Baker, but we’ll have to confiscate the radio and these binoculars. You’ll get them back after the war, though. Everything done within the law eh?”

  “So you keep saying,” Satomi says.

  “She’s pretty, the girl, real pretty, ain’t she?” the bald one announces to the room in general. “Don’t you worry none, honey. Nothing to worry about, you’re in America.”

  “Yeah, we’re in America, all right,” Satomi agrees.

  “No need to be snappy, girlie. It wasn’t us who bombed Japan, now, was it?”

  “Can we go now?” she asks. “You don’t need us here for this, do you?”

  The fear has brought on a need to pee, but nothing would induce her to ask the men if she might use her own bathroom.

  At the road’s edge they turn to look back at the house and see the one who didn’t smile pinning a FOR RENT sign on their door. A last check of the mailbox reveals an unsigned note written in pencil on the back of a feed label. Good Luck.

  For a brief moment Satomi imagines it came from Lily and instantly feels foolish. Of course it isn’t from Lily. How could she have thought it even for a second? Lily has let her go for good. Most likely Lily has a new rule to add to her list by now. No such thing as an American Jap.

  “It’s from Elena,” Tamura says. “I guess she didn’t want to sign it in case of trouble. They only tenant the berry farm. It’s not a good time to take sides, is it?”

  As though she is going somewhere nice, Tamura has dressed in her finest. She has chosen her blue-flowered dress to impress, a little felt pillbox of a hat to comfort. She slips the feed label into her mock-leather handbag, snapping the clasp shut with a sigh.

  “There are still good people in the world, Satomi,” she says. “Good people like Elena.”

  Every so often along the road Tamura has to stop and put the heavy suitcase down. Each time she does, something holds Satomi there long after Tamura has caught her breath. It is as though she has never seen the road before, never noticed the sweet scent of the pine trees, the little pockets of cattails, or the wild allium shoots springing up everywhere. She wonders briefly if there will be pine trees where they are going. She squats to pee behind some brambles and it occurs to her that like a dog she is marking her territory.

  “Give me your case, Mother. I can carry both.”

  Like Tamura, she is wearing her best too. Her white for-Sundays-only dress, and over it a wool plaid jacket that had been Tamura’s. Her shoes, a present for her fifteenth birthday, have inch-high heels that slim her calves and lend her the stance of a young woman. Tamura looks short beside her. She picks up Tamura’s case, anxious not to show her mother how scared she is. Along with the farm, along with Lily and Artie, along with everything, she is leaving her childhood behind her.

  Tamura is not yet recovered from her Christmas flu, which seems to have permanently stolen her appetite. She is pale still, and too thin. Her once-black hair has strands of gray showing through; her lips, too, have lost color. Despite her mother’s rallying moments, Satomi knows that Tamura is crushed, and she fears for her sanity. She has read of such things, of women going mad with grief.

  They hadn’t been expecting anything good—how could it have been anything good?—but they aren’t prepared for what meets them at the relocation point.

  “Why are there soldiers with guns?” Tamura says nervously, not really expecting an answer, but needing to give voice to her fear.

  The bus station is heaving with Japanese families, dressed, like them, in their best. Old men sit on their suitcases, looking bewildered. A huddle of elderly women surround the Buddhist priest, who is clutching his beads to his chest. He looks ancient and tired, too confused himself to be of any help to them. Children are playing in the dust at their mother’s feet; they are subdued, silent in their play, as if they know instinctively that it’s not a time to be troublesome. A lost child pulls at the hem of Satomi’s dress. The little girl has a label big as her hand pinned to her coat, with a number scrawled in black ink across it.

  “Where’s your mother?” Satomi asks her in Japanese, smiling so that the girl won’t be afraid.

  The child starts to wail, twisting the fabric of Satomi’s dress in her tiny hand, stamping her feet in the dust.

  Dropping the case and bag to the ground, Satomi picks her up, cradling her in the crook of her arm. With her free hand she clasps Tamura’s trembling one.

  “It’s all right, Mama, we’re together, it’s going to be all right.”

  The desire to take to her heels has never been stronger in her. She wants to run as fast as she has ever run—run to the deep woods, where the sweet whispering of the ghost pines will comfort her, lead her back to what she knows.

  A frantic mother comes to claim the lost child, relief and fury mixed in equal measure on her face. Tamura thinks she recognizes her but can’t remember from where. She says a polite hello. The woman hurries off without a word.

  “I am glad that you are not a baby anymore,” Tamura says softly, looking around her with horror. “How are these mothers to care for their babies without homes?”

  Neither of them mentions it to the other, but they realize at about the same time that fear has a scent, a faint odor that conjures up sweat and piss and stagnant water.

  “Join that line over there,” a civilian with an armband directs them.

  “No talking,” orders a soldier young enough to be Tamura’s son.

  “Why do they have guns?” Tamura repeats, wanting an answer now.

  “In case we try to escape, I guess.”

  A man in a civilian suit pulls them from the line and tells them to stand by the back of an open Army truck.

  “Who are you? What is your family name?” he barks.

  “Our family name is Baker,” Satomi barks back.

  “Point out your family.”

  “It is just the two of us, we are mother and daughter,” Tamura says.

  “You don’t look Japanese.” He looks at Satomi, his tone a touch less harsh than before.

  “Maybe not, but I am Japanese. Japanese enough for this place, anyway.”

  “Where is your father?”

  “He’s dead.” She stares him down. “He died in the attack at Pearl Harbor.”

  He pauses for a bit as though trying to work it out, but doesn’t comment.

  “Put your luggage up here on the tailgate. Open it up.”

  There is an air of refined brutality about him, something chilling in his pale eyes. Without knowing him, they can tell he is enjoying himself.

  “What’s all this stuff?” he protests, pulling out one of Aaron’s tools from the Indian blanket, scattering his shirts around. “If it is just the two of you, why have you brought a man’s things?”

  He doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would understand that Tamura needed to “breathe my husband in,” so Satomi doesn’t attempt an explanation.

  He finds the rice, and a mean grin spreads across his face as he throws it into the back of the truck. The sack splits open and a shower of grains patter onto the metal floor of the tailgate. Tamura’s eyes fill with tears; her hand flutters to her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t know, you see—”

  “You were told what to bring, it was clear enough.” He sighs and rolls his eyes. “It’s all confiscated. You people never learn. Go and join that line over there, you need to be fingerprinted and tagged.”

  By the time their bit of the line has reached the bus station’s washrooms, the men have been separated off. While the woman watch, they are strip-searched for contraband, for razors, for knives, and for the liquor it is held would drive them to mutiny.

  The once-familiar bus station, a place where Satomi and Lily had often sneaked cups of ice from the cooler by the soda machine, has become a place she hardly recognizes. There is no one behind the kiosk bar, no Coke or candy on sale, no familiar drivers to joke with them about being truant from school. A mile
or so from home, and they have become non-aliens on American soil. They are beginning to understand what the previously inexplicable words mean. They are politicians’ words, sneaky, self-serving, hiding-from-the-truth words.

  Quite a little crowd of townsfolk have come to see them off, a few name-calling, but most looking sympathetic. Mr. Beck is there, his face clown-white, his eyes seeking out Satomi in the crowd. When he sees her, his lips tighten and his eyes narrow as though he is in pain. She half expects him to do something dramatic, pull her away from the others, perhaps, and declaim that he must have his pupil back. But he doesn’t move a limb, not even to wipe his watering eyes, which he can’t blame on an absent wind.

  Satomi looks for Artie and finds instead his father, Mr. Goodwin, holding up a hand-painted sign that reads REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR. The slogan has become ubiquitous. It is on stamps, on luggage tags, on belt buckles and lapel pins, it’s hard-baked into ice-cream cones. How could the Japanese-Americans, of all people, ever forget Pearl Harbor?

  It is past four o’clock by the time they are given numbers and their internees’ records, which, to add insult to injury, have printed on them the advice that they should Keep Freedom in Your Future with U.S. Savings Bonds.

  Satomi scrunches hers and gives it to Tamura to put in her bag.

  “Stupid people,” she says, too loudly for Tamura’s comfort. “How can we buy saving bonds when they have stolen our money?”

  Hand in hand, they join the line for the buses. Tamura’s hand is warm despite the fact that she is shivering. Everyone is speaking Japanese, too quickly for Satomi to make much sense of. She is used to the plainsong of Tamura’s slower intonations. With a burning rage that she has no idea what to do with, she bites her lip and moves forward in the line.

  Inside the crowded bus the women and children are packed together without their men. They set to wailing when they are told to pull the window blinds down.

  “They are going to kill our husbands,” one woman shouts. “They don’t want us to see.”

  “Oh, my son,” another wails pitifully.

  The children, terrified at their mothers’ fear, join in, so that the driver has to shout over the racket to be heard.

  “Settle down. The men will join you at the other end. The blinds are to keep the sun off you. You don’t want to fry, do you?”

  Some are still weeping a half hour later when the convoy of buses pulls slowly out of the station to start on the three-hundred-mile journey to a place that everyone fears reaching.

  In the gloom of the shuttered bus, Tamura occupies herself with helping an elderly blind lady to settle on the narrow seat in front of her. She places the woman’s tiny suitcase under her feet to make her more comfortable.

  “I am Mrs. Inada,” the old woman says. “I am sorry if my cough disturbs you. My chest is bad, but I will do my best to be quiet.”

  “I am pleased to know you, Mrs. Inada. My name is Tamura Baker.”

  “Ah, Tamura is a good name. Do you have a husband, a son, left out there?”

  “My daughter Satomi is here with me. My husband is dead.”

  “Ah, then we are both widows. But at least you have a child. Mine, like his father, is dead also.”

  “There’s no shame, only sadness in it,” Tamura says, propping the old woman’s jacket behind her shoulders in place of a pillow, touching her hand lightly.

  It is the first time Satomi has heard her mother confess Aaron’s death out loud. That she said there’s no shame in it is reassuring.

  “You should try and sleep, Mrs. Inada. You will feel better after a sleep,” Tamura says.

  The old woman grabs her arm. “You won’t forget I’m here?”

  “No, I will look out for you.”

  Satomi releases her window blind and the hazy afternoon sun pools into her lap. She watches the familiar landscape slip slowly away, the pea and strawberry fields, and the sign that reads CROMER’S UNBEATABLE PEAS.

  Pressed up against the dusty window, she says a silent goodbye to the cemetery and to the rusty water tower where she had often sought shade. She says goodbye to the clump of self-set blueberries at the edge of the swimming hole, where she and Artie had dipped into the cool water on long careless summer days; days that were full of heat and desire and ignorance. She says goodbye to everything that feels familiar and suddenly unbearably loved.

  Temporary Accommodation

  Jumping the steps of the bus in one go, Satomi turns at the bottom to help Mrs. Inada down.

  “My case,” the old woman cries. “I’ve left my case.”

  “I have it,” Tamura assures her. “I am right behind you.”

  There is joy at being reunited with the men; husbands console wives, and mothers hug sons. Everyone, though, is dismayed at the sight of the long-abandoned racetrack, at the reek of decay, and at the cold officialdom that meets them at their destination. How are they expected to live in such a desolate place?

  “It’s horrible, nothing but a freezing half stable. How can this place be meant for humans?” Satomi gazes around in disbelief.

  A single bulb hangs from the ceiling of their allotted stall, casting a dismal low-watt glimmer. Two Army cots stand against the wall, a thin blanket folded neatly at the end of each, nothing else. No furniture, no means of cooking.

  They are told to line up to be issued canvas bags and a measure of straw to make their mattresses.

  “I will collect ours, Mother, and Mrs. Inada’s.”

  As the daylight fades to dark, Tamura guides Mrs. Inada into the stall with her.

  “You must stay with us,” she says. “We will look after you.”

  She is full of pity for the old blind woman, and everyone has to share. Better her than a total stranger.

  An hour or so later, Satomi returns with the make-do mattresses. She has seen unimaginable things in the lines to collect the narrow sacks, grown men crying, women staring as though in a trance, adults obeying orders like children.

  Mrs. Inada perches uncomfortably on the iron rim of her cot while Satomi arranges the mattress for her. Through the thin walls an old man’s complaints come to them in Japanese, his voice shaking with rage. They guess it is his daughter they can hear attempting to quiet him in English.

  “America makes much of freedom,” he shouts scornfully. “But it has never truly understood what freedom means. They will not have it that it includes the right to be different.”

  “It’s best not to be political, Doctor,” a male voice calls from a neighboring stall. “We are in enough trouble as it is.”

  “Let him speak, it’s only the truth,” Satomi shouts, and Tamura tsks and puts a finger to her lips.

  Satomi wonders if the old man is a medical doctor. It would be a relief to her if he was; Tamura does not look well, her eyes are dark-rimmed and sunken, and there is something febrile in her color. She hasn’t taken even the smallest bite of the bread they were given as they left the bus.

  “Take just a little, just a taste, Mama,” she coaxes, attempting to keep her eyes from the walls that have been so hastily painted that bits of straw and spiders on their run to freedom have been caught up in the wash. What looks to be a mouse tail coils in a ball of fluff in the corner of the room; the floor is beaded with mouse droppings and splatters of whitewash.

  With her back to Tamura, Satomi makes a fist of her hand and pushes it hard into her mouth to stop herself from moaning. Her knuckles bruise under the pressure of her teeth, a smear of blood salts her tongue.

  It smells as though something has died in the hovel, something bigger than a mouse—a rat, perhaps. She must hold on to herself, try not to be afraid; she has Tamura to think of, after all. But for the moment, at least, Tamura seems to be doing better than her. She is talking softly to Mrs. Inada, covering her tenderly with the Army blanket.

  “You will be fine, Mrs. Inada,” she says kindly. “You can sit in the sun tomorrow. Everything feels better in the sun.”

  Satomi thinks that Mrs. Inada is
lucky to be blind. She can’t see the grim hovel, be disgusted by its filth.

  “We should lay head to foot, Mama.” She eyes the narrow cot. “It will work better that way.”

  They take off their shoes and lay down in their clothes. Satomi covers them with her Indian blanket that still has the scent of home on it. She watches Tamura drift into sleep. How has this horrible thing happened to them? This is America, they are Americans.

  Unable in her exhaustion to sleep, she lies listening to the noises of the camp, to Mrs. Inada’s crusty cough, to the calls of strangers, and to the crying of babies. Misery moves in her, solid and heavy as a brick.

  That night, as in the nights that follow, they wake cold from their troubled dreams to a mottled light sieving through the perforated wood of their stable. Tamura’s dreams return her to the burning ones she suffered in the month after Aaron’s death. They find her falling, pitching into a murky sea, black flames consuming her. Satomi’s are of running on hard ground while being pursued by some dark predator.

  Tired and defeated, they stand around during the days trying to find a way to be, which seems impossible without even the simplest of utensils, not even a stove to make coffee, a chair to sit on. There is no housework to do, no land to work, only lines to join: lines for meals, for latrines, for showers.

  “You could spend your whole day just lining up for things,” Tamura says. “Thank God your father is not here. He was a stranger to patience.”

  “I’m going to move you up to the front, Mother,” Satomi says on their third day waiting in line for their turn in the bad-smelling latrines. “It’s only fair. You are too ill to stand for hours on end.”

  But Tamura won’t hear of it. She says there are those who are worse off than her, and claims that she is feeling a little better every day.

  Their neighbor in the next stall, Dr. Chiba—not a medical doctor after all, but a geologist with a political turn of mind—has taken to spending time with Satomi. He likes that she is as angry as him.

  “We must learn a new language now, it seems,” he snorts. “ ‘mess hall,’ ‘barrack,’ ‘issue,’ ‘latrine.’ “