A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  He’s the one, isn’t he, Mama?

  She is struggling to leave the life of Tamura and Cora and Manzanar behind her, to make this new one with Abe.

  Hunter had joined them in the suite for the wedding breakfast, eggs and hash browns, and sharp out-of-season strawberries with butter cake. He sat upright in his wheelchair, looking anxiously at Joseph as though his friend might crumble to nothing at any moment.

  But Joseph, in full actor’s mode, was playing the good loser. Besides, he was considering Satomi’s advice about not honoring the promise. If he reneged on it, his life would be restored to the one that suited him best. But to break a promise to a dying father is a sickening thing.

  Living with a woman other than Satomi held only terror for him. It was a dilemma. He’d go to Europe after the wedding. Think about it as he walked the streets of Paris, consider the way to go in the beauty of Rome. He needed a break, needed to put the promise on hold for a while.

  “You look wonderful,” he told her, admiring the simple blue shift, the fresh camellias fixed in the loop of her hair. “It’s down to my influence, of course.”

  After the ceremony she and Abe run through the stinging storm of rice thrown enthusiastically by the small wedding party, Abe’s laugh bursting from him, big and genuine. The ache in her has gone, and it’s nothing to do with the aspirin, she knows.

  Abe’s best man Don, his old school friend from Freeport, poses them on the steps of City Hall and clicks away with his camera until his film is used up. The day is cold, bright, and dry, a good day for walking, but they pile into cabs and make their way to Lutèce for lunch, Frances’s treat. More champagne, and toasts to their happiness, and Hunter loud in his drunkenness, weeping a little, nobody is sure for what. Joseph leaves before dessert to take him home.

  Heat Wave

  Abe’s life, the normality of it, she supposes, takes a bit of getting used to, but she isn’t the only one acclimatizing. His hometown friends are hesitant with her, suspicious of her past. What is she doing with Abe, a girl like her, the uptown queen of the society pages? Has she really given up a fortune to be with their friend? Is she playing games?

  “They’ll come around,” Abe comforts. “In any case, who cares what they think? You’re my girl, not theirs.”

  They had expected him to marry Corrine, the one Satomi has eclipsed. She is a local girl, after all, known since childhood, highly strung and needy, it’s true, but familiar, one of them. Still, Satomi isn’t putting on any airs. They’ll make the effort for Abe’s sake.

  Frances, who hadn’t cared much for Corrine, is settling to the idea of Satomi, so when Satomi asks her about Corrine she doesn’t hold back.

  “ ‘Pretty’ and ‘prissy’ are the words I’d choose.” She laughs. “I guess she knew she would have a hard job hanging on to him.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, well, it’s just my opinion, of course, but it never seemed right to me. Abe always wanted his friends around when he was with her, never seemed at ease when it was just the two of them. And Corrine couldn’t bear being on the water, couldn’t swim, was scared of drowning, I think. You couldn’t blame her for that, but Abe loves the water, you can’t keep him off it. It caused problems. It wasn’t like it is with you. He can’t wait to get you alone. Even I feel in the way sometimes.”

  “Oh, Frances, you shouldn’t. Abe adores you.” She is embarrassed, not yet comfortable enough with Frances to be talking about Abe and the love thing.

  “I guess,” Frances says. “I understand, though. His father and I were a love match too. No matter how long it lasts, you can’t beat that, can you?”

  “You can’t. Its good luck, isn’t it?”

  “Mmm, better than winning the lottery. And you deserve some luck, Satomi, after what you’ve been through, losing your father and mother so young.”

  Satomi feels protective of Tamura, at a loss as to how to describe to Frances the loveliness that was her mother. Abe understands, though, he speaks of Tamura softly, with a tactfulness that leans toward affection, as though he might have known and loved her too.

  “Does Abe ever talk about his father to you?” Frances hurries to fill the silence between them. She thinks that she will never feel entirely at ease with Satomi, silences must be filled, eye contact kept to the minimum. Abe chose not to pattern by his mother when choosing his wife, so they have little other than him in common.

  “He says that he has fragments of memory of him, pictures that come to him sometimes. He remembers being picked up and thrown in the air, having his hair stroked as he fell asleep.”

  “I’m glad he remembers anything at all,” Frances says. “He was only three when Ben had his heart attack.”

  “Oh, my poor Abe,” Satomi says. “And you too, Frances.”

  “I can’t tell you what it did to me. Ben had never shown any signs of being ill at all, you see. Well, nothing that I noticed, anyway. He’d been sailing all that day, and I should have been with him, only I wanted to stay home and cozy up. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “No, but I just wish that I’d been with him. I guess it wouldn’t have changed anything, though. But he was so close to home, to me, when it happened, you see. I saw his boat come into port from the kitchen window, saw him on deck, and I waved, but he didn’t wave back. Didn’t see me, I guess.” She is surprised to find herself confiding in Satomi, but can’t seem to stop. “I was in the middle of making an egg cream, his favorite. I laid the table and waited, but he didn’t come. I remember being angry that he was puttering around without a thought for me—that is, until it got dark and he didn’t come, and didn’t come. I found him in the cabin lying on the bunk, peaceful as could be. I knew straight off that he wasn’t sleeping.”

  “And then it was just you and Abe.”

  “Yes, but I was hardly a mother to him that year. I did my best, all the practical things, you know. My heart wasn’t with Abe, though, it was with Ben.”

  Tears spring to Satomi’s eyes at the thought of it. She remembers the time after Aaron had died, the way Tamura in her misery had forgotten that she was a mother too.

  “Did you never consider marrying again, Frances?”

  “Only once, much later, but it wouldn’t have worked. I was always measuring the guy against Ben. It sounds crazy, but just the fact that the socks were different, the choice of newspaper, it switched me off somehow. You know how it is when you love someone. You can’t stop comparing. And it wasn’t just that Ben was a catch, the handsome local doctor that everyone liked, although I guess all that helped. It was more how he made me feel about myself, about us as a couple. I wanted to have that feeling again. It just never came with anyone else.”

  Frances is surprised at how easy it is to confide in Satomi, but she’s still anxious. It’s her own kind of snobbery, she thinks, but the high-living thing feels dangerous to her. Maybe Satomi will miss it when married life settles down. She can’t imagine what it does to you to have such a fortune at your disposal. And the beauty thing is startling, exotic, and she isn’t used to startling or exotic. But she can see why Satomi has given up a fortune to be with Abe. It is Abe, after all, and the girl has steel.

  “I guess you are finding it quite cramped in Abe’s little apartment, huh?”

  “It’s pretty small, but I have lived in smaller and it’s very comfortable, and besides, we are here almost every weekend. And oh, my goodness, Abe’s shower is wonderful, so much water, like Niagara Falls.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’re that easy to please.” Frances is genuinely surprised. The girl had lived in a fourteen-room duplex in Manhattan, but she raves about a shower that works in a two-room apartment in Jackson Heights.

  “There’s nothing as precious as water, Frances. Nothing in the world.”

  “Well, while we’re on the subject of water, you might want to please Abe and learn to sail. Sailing’s a big thing around here and Abe has loved it
since he was a little boy.”

  “Oh, I’ve sailed with Joseph. He always says that it’s the best thing …” It occurs to her that she is always bringing Joseph into the conversation.

  “Do you mind me talking about him?”

  “It takes time to let people go. And I guess that you loved him once.”

  “I still do. Not in a way that is anything like the way I love Abe. I’ll tell you all about it if you want. You won’t like it, though.”

  “Whenever you’re ready, honey, I don’t need to know.”

  “I don’t want you to think badly of Joseph. Abe doesn’t like him, and that’s natural, I guess, but he’s my best friend in New York. He’s a good person.”

  Frances, with memories of Ben stirred, has trouble imagining what sort of affair Satomi and Joseph had. It was a one-in-a-million chance that Satomi should even have met a man like Joseph, let alone move in with him without being married. But then, who is she to criticize? She couldn’t claim to have been the virgin bride when she married Ben. They may not have lived together, but they had the boat with its cozy cabin, and times have changed, after all.

  Everything is upside down since the war. People don’t trust that they have time anymore. And Satomi must have been lonely in New York, straight out of her years of confinement in the camp. Were there really those places in America? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Abe, usually so considerate of her feelings, doesn’t want to hear about Joseph. No matter what Satomi wants, he can’t imagine ever having the man as a friend. Joseph’s kind unsettles him, he doesn’t understand such desires, doesn’t want to know about them. If there’s anything that disturbs him about Satomi, it’s that bit of sophistication that Joseph has exposed her to, the experiences he wishes she’d never had.

  And if he’s honest, the Cora thing bothers him too. He feels bad about it, but it’s hard to understand the connection Satomi feels with the child. He’s doing his best, though, fighting off the thought that there’s nothing like your own flesh and blood. If Satomi wants Cora, then he can live with it. Whatever happens, whatever compromises they have to make, they’re strong enough to weather them.

  “We’ll want to start a family of our own one day,” he says.

  “I want that too, Abe. It would be wonderful if Cora is with a family, and happy. That would be fine with me. I just need to see her, to know that she’s okay.”

  But what, he thinks, if she never finds her? Will it come between them, that bit of her that will always be longing, the bit he can do nothing to make better?

  New York drips in a heat wave that reminds her of the one in Angelina.

  Fresh out of the shower, Abe leaves for work in the mornings, his shirt sticking to his back before he is out the door.

  “I’ve never known it quite this bad,” he says. “What I’d give to be on the water.”

  The temperature is hitting triple digits, blistering the paint on their windowsills, creating asphalt heat islands that bubble up between the trees on the sidewalk. The apartment sweats its way through August with them, no air-conditioning, but the fan going furiously.

  “It seems to affect me more than you,” Abe says. “How do you manage to look so cool?”

  “Years of mountain weather,” she says.

  The electric feeder cables fail intermittently, so that more often than not their evenings are spent in the dark. In the blackouts they eat dinner by candlelight and read in the greenish glow of a shared flashlight, balanced precariously above their heads in the iron-work of the bedstead. The cold water runs warm, so to save money they switch the water heater off.

  “With that and the cuts, we’ll halve the energy cost,” Abe says.

  On investigation Abe discovers the puzzling hum in the bathroom to be a wasp’s nest inside the extractor fan. He pours a poisonous powder down through the blades and the wasps go mad, darkening the room as they emerge heading for the light, covering the windowpanes in a thick humming curtain. For days after Satomi comes across dead ones on the floor and the window ledges, two floating in the milk jug.

  On his day off, when the sweet cooing of their neighbors’ pigeons stops, Abe goes to the roof to investigate and comes back with the news that their drinking water has evaporated in the heat.

  “Dead,” he says. “Never seen the like. I know for a fact they top that water up every morning before they leave for work.”

  When they can’t sleep, they sit outside on the fire escape and Abe reads the night sky to her, pointing out the stars and the constellations. He loves naming them, as though the words conjure up something magical for him, Ursa Major, and Minor too, Lupus the wolf, and Orion the hunter.

  “You get to know the stars at sea,” he tells her. “Nothing like a clear night at sea.”

  It doesn’t matter that the butter melts in their ailing icebox, that the milk goes sour in a day—nothing outside of the two of them matters. So what if they can’t sleep in the heat? The hot nights are made for love anyway, for talking, for planning their future.

  There is nothing like making love with Abe, nothing like the scent of him, fresh and green like ferns. And no feeling compares to the exquisite sense she has that they belong to each other, that they are complete. If the world went away and they were alone, it would be enough.

  When Abe covers her, something in her breaks, a break he fills so completely that she forgets the camp, forgets Cora, forgets everything. And after, returned to herself in those quiet moments meant for expressing truths, there is only a small sense of remorse that she hasn’t yet told him of Haru. He is hardly resigned to the idea of Joseph in her life, without testing him with a past lover. And he would mind, she believes. He is a predictable man, true to the morals of his time. Abe knowing about Haru wouldn’t break them, but she can’t bear the thought of hurting him.

  While Abe works, she plays housewife, cleaning the apartment, washing and ironing, shopping for their food. The chores are not enough to fill the day, and time stalls in the waiting-for-Abe hours. Long before she needs to, she takes the streetcar across the Queensboro Bridge to meet him from work. She sits on their special bench reading the same page of her book over and over, not able to concentrate on anything but the idea that he is somewhere close, that she will see him soon. Sometimes she changes benches so that he will have to look for her, so that she can watch him looking for her.

  They talk of getting a bigger apartment, of how it will be when they have children. “Not yet, but soon,” Abe says. They have the names all ready, Aaron for the boy, Iris, after Abe’s beloved long-dead grandmother, for the girl. She considers bringing Cora into the conversation but can’t seem to get the words out.

  “It must be Aaron for the boy,” Abe says generously. “He must know he was named for a hero.”

  Of course they will have a boy and a girl, and in that order. They have found each other and will have everything they want. They are blessed, aren’t they?

  On Abe’s summer break, they go to Freeport. The heat is not so bad on the coast, there is always a breeze and the nights are cooler than in the city. Abe is happy there. So she is happy there.

  They sail every day. He’s surprised how good she is at it.

  “Captain and mate,” he says. “Not sure which of us is captain, though.”

  She watches him raise the sail, admires the muscles in his tanned arms, the creases around his eyes as he squints in the sunlight. Love and lust collide and meld softly in her.

  Anchored in port, he takes her on the cabin’s impossibly small bunk, still surprised that she is as eager for it as he is for her. They always end up in a heap on the floor, tangled in the cover.

  “We’ll be black and blue all over if we don’t stop this.” She laughs. “Then what will Frances think?”

  “Let’s never stop this, Sati, never, never.”

  And after, beer straight from the bottle, hauled up from its net in the sea where Abe keeps it cooling. They play cards on deck with Wilson bunched up at the
ir feet, snoring in his doggy sleep. They stay till dark, not wanting to share their time with anyone, not even Frances.

  Abe introduces her to his Freeport, to the shopkeepers and the people who hunker down in the place after the tourists have gone. They are overly polite with her, cautious.

  “Don’t let it worry you,” Abe says. “They don’t matter.”

  Satomi is reminded of how hard it is to break into the circle. There have been so many circles in her life that she has skimmed around the edge of, never quite making it to the inside. Abe is the only one who sees her for who she is, who loves her because she is Satomi. Artie saw too much Japanese in her, Haru not enough. With Abe, though, she’s just right. Even if she never quite fits in with those others he loves, she’s inside the circle with him.

  “It’s a different world in winter,” he tells her. “The sailing’s not so easy, but I like it better. You’ll see, you’ll love it in winter.”

  They walk the canals and on through the fields of pure white salt marshes that open out to the clean Atlantic Ocean.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Have you ever seen anywhere so beautiful?”

  She thinks of Fishers Island, of Joseph’s sleek yacht Windward cutting through the gray-green ocean. Her first sight of it had taken her breath away.

  “No, never, it’s just perfect,” she says.

  He takes her to the Kissing Bridge over the Millburn but refuses to kiss her.

  “I’ve kissed too many girls here,” he says seriously. “You’re not a bridge-kissing sort of girl, you’re for keeps.”

  “Did you kiss Corrine here?”

  “Oh, sure I did, her and a few others besides.”

  They stroll along the Nautical Mile, where in the Crab Shack Abe’s friends, home for the summer, join them. Abe’s order is always the same, steamed clams and his favorite light beer, brought to the table in glass pitchers, the liquid trembling gold in the sunlight.

  “Nothing like Freeport steamers,” he says.