A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  I should have answered sooner but as you can see by the address I have left the West Coast behind me. Honestly, Eriko, it takes so much time to settle in this city, it’s a crazy place and it’s so big, I could never have imagined how big.

  I was sorry to hear that Little Tokyo has changed so much and that the Negroes have taken it over. I know you hoped for familiar faces but I guess most inmates opted for relocation hoping for better things. You’ll make friends, though, I’m sure. We learned the lesson of getting along with each other well at Manzanar, didn’t we? If you can live alongside Mr. Sano you can live alongside anyone.

  I can see you smiling as you read this thinking that most learned that lesson better than me. I guess I’ll never walk in my mother’s shoes, that’s too much to hope for, but I’m trying.

  The camps are never spoken of here. As far as New York is concerned they may never have happened. We Japanese are as much to blame for that as the government, there seems to be a conspiracy of silence among us. Why should we be ashamed, though?

  It must be good to have your business back, even if as you say people only buy cheap cotton these days.

  When I thanked Dr. Harper for helping me, for taking me back to Angelina, he said that it was the least he could do for Tamura’s daughter. He had tears in his eyes, Eriko, and his voice trembled. He said that he had been very fond of Tamura. I think that he loved her. I think that Dr. Harper is a romantic. He saw the girl in my mother from the start, the very thing I think my father loved in her too. Perhaps men are more romantic than women altogether.

  It seems to me you have to be lucky to do well in New York, lucky to get a job, lucky to make friends, lucky not to be taken in by the “con men” that hover on every street corner. Dr. Harper’s cousin Edward warned me about them. He said to be careful or they would empty my purse before I knew it.

  People here are infected with the “New York” bug. Everyone wants to get rich. I guess that dream makes New York what it is. People see what it has to offer and are ambitious for it. Edward says that there are more victims of hope here than in any other city in the world.

  I don’t stand out here at all. Everyone seems to be a refugee of one sort or another. There are Japanese around, and lots of Chinese, and honestly I don’t think most people can tell the difference. I’m always being taken for Italian anyway. Still, I cherish my Japanese half, the half that makes me part of you. I know now, though, that I will never be just right for everyone, none of us will. There’s nothing to be done about that.

  I’m not sorry that I came here, although I can’t get used to the thin light or the small sky, and there’s too much concrete and not enough green. And you will find it strange that I miss the mountains. A part of me is forever spinning, not knowing quite how to settle. The contrast between here and the camp is extreme. It rocks me sometimes, but I’m not afraid. I know you can never be free of the past but I’m determined not to live off it, to make it an excuse for every bad thing that happens.

  Today is a good day, but they are not all good. It’s odd to be lonely in a city teeming with people. For all the awful things about Manzanar, I don’t remember ever feeling lonely there. The other night from the harbor I heard the Queen Mary blow. It sounded marooned, just like me.

  When I first arrived I stayed with Dr. Harper’s cousin and his wife. They have a tiny apartment and I had to sleep on an “Easy” bed in their sitting room, which was fine for me but not so nice for them I imagine. Being childless they weren’t used to sharing their small space. They tried not to show it but I think that they were uneasy with me there. I moved a couple of weeks ago into a small room of my own—I have a gas ring and a sink and a bed that drops down from a cupboard. Luxury.

  There’s no rationing here, you can even get steak if you have the money. I long sometimes though for miso and, oddly, for mess-hall rice.

  My room has a window looking onto a brick wall. It’s dark but it’s better I suppose than peering into someone else’s apartment. My neighbor in the room next door, Mrs. Copeland, is very old, eighty perhaps. She has a sharp tongue but manages to be charming. She won’t take a shower until I return from work. “Listen out for me, darling,” she says. “I’ll die in that shower one day.”

  She has no family here but is well known in the neighborhood. I only see old people in this building. I’m pretty sure I must be its youngest resident.

  Dr. Harper’s cousin got me a job in their local library unpacking and putting out the new books. The good thing about that job was all the books I got to read without it costing me a cent.

  I have taken a job now in the cloakroom of the Clare House Museum. It’s known for its collection of Flemish paintings, and it has two galleries full of French porcelain. Are you used to using china again now?

  This job pays more than the library one, but I’m not sure that it’s a step up. I take in hats and hang up coats all day long. Sometimes it feels like I am hiding in my cubicle, keeping myself from the world. See, I am not as brave as I would like you to believe. But I get to see the art, and the director, a man who goes around straightening pictures and looking for dust, although I guess he has more important things to do, says that he likes my look and my manner, and that he is sure my fluency in Japanese can be put to good use. “But Japanese,” he says, screwing up his face. “Are we ready to hear it?”

  Are you wondering about Cora? I think of her all the time. I’m still angry that they wouldn’t let me have her. It would have been hard but I think we could have managed. What should I do, Eriko? What can I do about that? I don’t suppose you have heard anything? Dr. Harper is trying to find out where she is so that I can write to her. You would think that he was asking them to disclose a state secret, but as he says, the likelihood is that they don’t know where she is and can’t be bothered to find out. I long to know how she is doing, and I watch for the mail and hope. Please look out for her. You never know, it’s possible she could turn up somewhere in Little Tokyo.

  It made me smile to hear that Yumi is getting hard to handle. I miss her naughtiness, the way she laughs that cheeky laugh and you have to forgive her everything. Children of the camp are bound to be unruly, I think.

  I’m not at all surprised that Haru has become a hero. He always gives the best of himself. I read that his combat unit was among the bravest, the most decorated of them all. And Ralph too, so brave that they gave him the Bronze Star for bravery in combat. Was it Manzanar that made them so strong, do you think?

  Please give my love to your mother, and to Yumi, and my best wishes to Haru.

  I miss you all, Eriko.

  Satomi

  The air in her apartment building smells bad, a stale, ever-present, meaty sort of odor. It’s the first thing to assail the senses on entering the building, before the crumbling walls and scuffed floors meet the eye.

  “It’s the stench of poverty,” Mrs. Copeland says. “I’ve lived here for twenty years and I’ll never get used to it.”

  “I know of worse, Mrs Copeland. But it sure is unpleasant.”

  “Well, be like me, darling, plan to get yourself a rich man and move on.” Her laugh is not without bitterness.

  Mrs. Copeland calls herself “a woman of independent means.” It’s her way of describing how she struggles to live off the diminishing capital from the sale of her small dress shop that she retired from seven years before the war.

  She is curious about Satomi, about the American internment camps, horrified at the idea of them. She couldn’t believe what went on in them at first, but now she is angry on Satomi’s behalf, appalled that it’s not only Germany to be condemned.

  “A black mark against us,” she says. “Such a tragedy, for you to have lost your mother there.”

  She is mourning herself, for her German cousins, the last of her known family, whom she hasn’t heard from in years.

  “They must be lost, like all those others,” she says. “I’ll probably never know what happened to them.”

  As
old as she is, Mrs. Copeland volunteers at the local refugee center twice a week, helping in the kitchen, handing out secondhand clothes, pinning up the lists of people looking for their relatives. You never know, someone might turn up there who knows of her cousins, and what else is she to do with her time anyway?

  “And your Cora,” she says to Satomi. “Your hope is realistic. Keep your spirits up, there’s a chance you’ll find her.”

  To counteract the smell in her building, Satomi scents her room with the cheap bleach she buys at the big Woolworth’s store a block from her building. She cleans like a demon these days in a way that would amaze and please Tamura. Her room has become her refuge from the city, a place where she doesn’t have to be on alert. In its shabby confines she can let go of the confident show she puts on at work and in the subway, when the panic of being underground rattles her.

  Like a true city girl, she jostles for space in the coffee shops with the best of them, shouting her order over the counters, where the help hardly ever return a smile. She is learning to be a New Yorker by pretending to be one. Life in the city is tricky, people move fast, have no patience, and she is always running to catch up, to wise up.

  “Keep your foot hard down on the gas, it’s the only way,” Mrs. Copeland advises.

  Her wages run out by Friday, so that she lives during the weekends on her last bit of bread, a smear of butter. And she has lost weight, so that she notices that she is skinnier than the better-fed New Yorkers she sees around her.

  Apart from her fare to New York, she has twice broken into the money she got for the farm. Once to buy a child’s charm bracelet for Cora, which she couldn’t resist. It has a little bell hanging on it and a tiny bucket, and space for plenty more. She keeps it in a chocolate box that was left in the trash at the library. The box is well made, a three-layer deep one, shiny brown edged with gold, she can only imagine the kind of chocolates it housed. It’s surprising to her the things that New Yorkers throw away. She has put a dollar in the box along with a little peg doll Mrs. Copeland saved for her from the refuge. It helps her to collect things for Cora, to keep the child in mind.

  And for herself she needed clothes for work, two dark skirts, two shirts, one white, one striped, and a jacket for colder days. She is reinventing herself, creating a new style. Haru would not approve of the short hemlines, the high-wedged heels of her shoes. Oxfords don’t cut it in New York. She tells herself that she must stop judging things by what Haru would think. She can please herself now.

  There’s plenty more she’d like to buy, a dress or two, ankle-strap shoes in the softest leather like nothing she ever saw in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. She’s tempted but can’t bring herself to be so extravagant. The money put aside is her safety net, the last bit of Aaron and Tamura to make her feel cared for. It’s hard to be without kin.

  She sees families together and feels intensely lonely, aches to be among the Japanese again. But when she speaks to them in Japanese they don’t hang around.

  “They think I’m a strange white girl,” she tells Mrs. Copeland. “Guess I look like trouble to them.”

  Her neighborhood teems with every sort, Germans, Polish, Chinese, Romanians, Italians, and Jews like Mrs. Copeland. She wonders if there’s such thing as a pure New Yorker. It should make her feel included, but she has never felt so alone.

  “Don’t let New York gobble you up,” Mrs. Copeland says. “Take the first bite yourself.”

  On a Sunday afternoon when her building is hushed with the slumbering old, she takes the advice and walks the streets to the park to sit on the grass and watch the passersby. A Japanese family is doing the same nearby, father, mother, three well-behaved children. Just the sight of them lifts her heart, the familiar dark hair, the lyrical sound of Japanese catching her by her heels.

  “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” she says in Japanese. “Such a lovely day.”

  And there it is, that confused, suspicious look. How is it that a white girl speaks Japanese so well?

  “My mother was Japanese,” she tries to explain as they gather their things and hurry off. “We were in Manzanar,” she calls after them. They half turn, bowing their heads, smiling to be polite.

  Since Pearl Harbor, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the camps, they are afraid. They’ve done nothing wrong, but it’s best to stick to your own. They fear being singled out, being noticed.

  She remembers Dr. Harper’s parting words to her. “Find a way to be that allows you to remember the past without spoiling the present.” Well, she’s trying.

  She’s still grieving for Tamura, still longing for Cora, and there’s a low fever, a desire in her that it’s hard to admit to. She has a longing to make love again, to be lost again in the intimacy she had that one time with Haru. It bothers her that she may be the loose kind, just as Lily had suspected. Are women meant to have such thoughts?

  Men approach her and she isn’t sure how to judge their natures. They are not of the kind she knew in Angelina or in the camp.

  “Everyone’s on the make, darling,” Mrs. Copeland warns. “Watch yourself.”

  And she does, although she hadn’t been prepared in those early days working in the library for her first date in the city to end so badly.

  “Randal Daly, pure Irish,” he had introduced himself to her as she was stacking books on the crime section shelves.

  A nice enough guy, she thought, a library regular who devoured detective novels. He ran an oyster stall at the Fulton Fish Market and smelled of the lemons he cleaned himself off with at night. He was big and comfortable-looking, not handsome, but a good face, she thought. She hadn’t minded his brashness; she was getting used to brashness, it was a New York thing.

  She had dressed with care, folding her hair into a soft chignon, smudging her lips with a rose-colored lipstick. She bought fifteen-denier nylons, not caring that they were impractical. She wet her hands and ran them from ankle to thigh, setting the seams straight. It was good to feel pretty.

  “My God, is it you?” Mrs. Copeland said appreciatively. “Be careful, now. You’re still on the wrong side of green for New York, you know.”

  He had taken her to Sloppy Louie’s restaurant near his work, a favorite with the fishmongers.

  “I eat breakfast here every day,” he said. “I like to be near the river.”

  The restaurant was spacious; they were early, but it was already more than half full. Randal thought it a bad idea to eat late.

  “Better to give things time to go down,” he said.

  On their way to the table he greeted people at theirs, exchanging pleasantries, slapping the men on the back, complimenting the women.

  “It’ll be jam-packed in an hour,” he said proudly, as though it were his own place doing so well.

  The barnlike eatery was decorated with things of the sea, model sailing ships marooned in rye bottles, giant lobster claws hooking the air, hulking oyster shells glued randomly on the walls. It was hard to hear over the din of people chatting, calling to the waiters, clattering the cutlery—it reminded her of the mess halls in Manzanar. A brothy scent of fish, rich and steamy, made the room feel warm and living. It was good to be out, to be part of the world.

  Randal’s cheeks had turned red in the heat of the room; she wondered if her own had done the same. He ordered for her.

  “I know what’s good,” he said.

  “That’s fine.” She was glad, nervous at the thought of having to make a choice.

  “You’ll like the chowder,” he said, proffering the pepper. “It’s good with pepper.”

  He had advised against the eels. “Dirty things,” he said. “Bottom of the harbor trash, night scavengers. Only fish I never touch.”

  He did most of the talking, telling her that he liked his job, it gave him a good living, and there was more to oysters than people thought.

  “Got to know the good from the bad, the sweet from the sour,” he said. “Trade secret how it’s done.”

  He had ne
ver dated anyone who worked in a library, he said with a laugh. “Guess you’re pretty smart, but nothing wrong with that.”

  “Oh, not so smart. I’m only the shelf-stacker.”

  He had an odd way of not responding, as though he hardly heard her, as though he were working out what he was going to say next himself. Perhaps, though, it was only that he was lonely too, eager to talk.

  By the time dessert came she knew his age, the kind of movies he liked, “westerns and detectives.” She knew that his mother was dead and that he lived with his father, who worked with him in the fish market.

  “This place is the best, isn’t it? Louie’s Italian like you,” he said over coffee, waving to the proprietor. “Married to an Irish-American. It’s a good combination, like you and me.”

  She laughed, used to the mistake. “Oh, I’m not Italian, Randal. I’m half Japanese.”

  The moment she said it she saw the effect it had on him. He couldn’t have been more surprised if she had reached across the table and punched him in the face for no good reason. He stared at her, confused, his eyes screwing up as though he were trying to work out some difficult math problem.

  “What?” His face darkened. His voice was suddenly harder, mean.

  “You’re a Jap? A Jap?”

  “Yes, I’m Japanese. I’m Japanese and you’re Irish. So?”

  He stood up without looking at her, kicked the chair aside, and threw a few dollars on the table.

  “Warn a guy next time,” he flung at her, heading to the door.

  The room went quiet, people began to stare. She watched him clumsily navigating the tables, heard his “Jesus” addressed to no one in particular. She put a napkin to her lips, swallowed hard, fighting nausea.

  “You okay, honey?” the woman at the next table asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  Outside the restaurant, she felt disoriented, out of place on the sidewalk in the dark. It was raining, the drops falling like snow, thick and slow. The insistent whisper of the river came to her. She thought of the eels Randal had spoken of curling in the deep dirty depths of the harbor, comfortable down there in the dark, knowing their place.