1001 Cranes

by Naomi Hirahara

  “I dunno. Six, I guess.”

  “You’re lucky; you have small feet. Not monster ones like me.” Keila points to beat-up red bowling shoes that have a large number eight on the back.

  “You must be Keila,” my mother says. “I’m Angela’s mother, Ms. Inui.”

  “I thought your last name was Kato.” Keila’s large eyes widen.

  “She kept her maiden name.”

  “Oh,” Keila says, and then smiles.

  I then wonder if that was my mother’s intention all along: to keep that former part of herself in case marriage to my dad didn’t work out.

  Keila links arms with me and takes me to a booth where triangles of cold pizza lie in open boxes.

  “Nathan’s here,” she says.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I say.

  “You do?” Keila seems surprised. “At your school?”

  “He actually lives here. His name is Tony.”

  “Why didn’t you invite him?”

  “He couldn’t make it,” I say. I don’t want to get into having been caught kissing and being grounded. For some reason I care about how Keila sees me: as a better version of myself.

  Keila helps me look for a bowling ball with a good fit. I always feel funny about sticking my thumbs into the holes of neon-colored bowling balls. Who was using it before me? When you rent the shoes, they spray the ragged insides with Lysol. The alley needs a little spray for the thumbholes, I think.

  I finally go with a neon pink ball, eight pounds. Keila’s impressed; hers is only seven pounds. But she has skinny matchstick arms. Mine are like stretched-out turkey drumsticks, meaty and solid.

  “Angela’s on my team,” Keila calls out to the others. Pastor Barry is sitting in front of the scoring computer and nods to me.

  We can’t have two girls on the same team,” Nathan says to Keila. I can tell that they’ve known each other for a while, because he speaks to her like she’s his younger sister. Angela’s on our team.”

  “Nathan’s right, Keila,” Pastor Barry says, and before I know it, he’s pressed “AK” on his keyboard and I’m set to bowl after “NC.”

  “Oh well.” Keila’s disappointed.

  I sit down next to her and pull off my Vans. I’m happy that I brought an extra pair of socks. The insides of my size-six bowling shoes are all worn, and when I slide my feet in, they feel slightly damp and warm.

  “It’s the Lysol,” Keila says, wrinkling her nose.

  “Well, whose team am I on?” Mom asks. I forgot about my mother. I thought she was going to sit back with the cold pieces of pizza. But that wouldn’t be Mom. She likes to be where the action is. She has already picked out a sleek midnight blue ball that looks like it’s brand-new. “Didn’t know I did my share of bowling in high school, did you, Angie?” Mom says to me. “I’ve even bowled here a few times when this alley was practically new.”

  Pastor Barry stands up. “You’re Angie’s mom? I’m Barry, the youth pastor.”

  “Karen.” My mother extends her hand, and I’m dismayed. Mom is never this friendly. Has she, like the rest of the girls, fallen for Pastor Barry?

  “You can bowl on our team,” he says.

  “I thought two girls couldn’t be on the same team,” I say.

  “Angie, I’m not one of you girls,” Mom slips off her flip-flops and takes a pair of short athletic socks from her purse. She stretches out her legs so that everyone can see her painted toe nails before she covers them with her socks. I’m so embarrassed.

  It’s four of us—Nathan, me, and his two friends—against Pastor Barry, Keila, two other boys, and Mom. I’m the lousiest bowler on my team, and Nathan’s friends rub it in. “She needs a handicap. Give her fifty extra points,” they say after I roll my third gutter ball.

  “Angie, you’re twisting your hand. Stretch out your arm, let go, and aim your thumb towards your nose.” My mother tries to coach me from the chairs on the other side.

  Hit your own nose with your thumb, I think.

  Keila cheers me on even though she’s on the other team, and Nathan just says I have bad luck. He sticks out his balled fist toward me and I wrinkle my nose. “Press your fist against mine,” he says. I don’t know what that’s supposed to prove, but I do it. I guess it means “too bad” or something like that.

  Nathan, or “NC,” is a really good bowler. He gets a couple of strikes. Everyone cheers—even the other teams—and he high-fives us all. When he touches my palm, I notice that his hands feel callused—maybe from the grappling in judo?—and then I feel ashamed. I’m Tony’s girlfriend; why am I thinking about how another boy’s hand feels?

  Pastor Barry turns out to be an even better bowler. He gets a turkey, which is three strikes in a row. A cartoon turkey even blinks on a video screen above. Everyone cheers again and I notice that he high-fives Mom with both hands instead of just one.

  We play two games. They win one and we win one. I end my second game with an 84, which isn’t bad, because Keila gets a 70. I almost suspect that Keila started getting gutter balls just so I wouldn’t feel bad, but she says that her arms were getting tired. When she shows me her swollen red thumb, I finally believe her, and we go to the bathroom together to wash our hands.

  “Yuck, the lanes are so dirty,” I say, spreading out my fingers, which are practically black. We take turns squirting soap into our hands, and the water turns gray with the dirt.

  “Too bad Tony couldn’t make it,” says Keila.

  “Huh?” I’ve almost forgotten that I told her Tony’s name. “Yeah.”

  “You know…” Keila gets close to me. “Nathan really, really likes you.”

  “How do you know?” My cheeks become flushed.

  “Because he told me. I didn’t know what to say to him—you know, because of Tony. But I just wanted to make sure that you and Tony are together-together.”

  I step back from Keila. “What, you think I’m lying?”

  “No, no, it’s not that. I’ve just never met him. I think Nathan is so much better.”

  “If you’ve never met Tony, how would you know?” I grab some paper towels from the dispenser. I’m not liking Keila anymore, and my real self is starting to show. “And anyway, you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.” I throw the paper towels toward the trash can, but I miss. Keila bends down to pick them up and I take the opportunity to leave.

  Pastor Barry is talking to my mother at the table with the pizza boxes. She’s way too old for you, I think. And she’s married.

  “Mom, I’m not feeling well.”

  “It must have been the pizza, huh?”

  “I’m really feeling bad.”

  Since I usually don’t say things like this, Mom takes me seriously. “Well, nice meeting you, Barry,” she says, and shakes his hand again. “I’ll be in touch with you about that other matter.”

  When we are in the car, I finally ask her, “What other matter?”

  “What?”

  “What’s that other matter you were talking about with Pastor Barry?”

  “Oh, you heard that.”

  I hear everything you say, I think. “So what were you talking about?”

  Mom adjusts her jacket and tightens her grip on the keys in her hand. “How would you feel if we moved down here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we moved to L.A.—I’m not talking about Gardena specifically—on a more permanent basis.”

  “What do you mean—you, me, and Dad?”

  “No, just you and me.”

  “I would think that it would be awful. Terrible.”

  “But there are girls like Keila. Nice girls you could be friends with.”

  “She’s not that nice,” I say. “And I miss Emilie.” I do miss Emilie, but I suddenly realize that we haven’t talked once this summer. “I miss our house,” I add, and it’s true.

  “There’re plenty of nice houses here in Los Angeles. Besides, I thought you were starting to get used to it down here.”


  “But it wasn’t for forever. I can’t live here for forever.” I picture our house in the woods tumbling down, falling apart.

  “Just try to keep an open mind, Angela.”

  I don’t know what Mom is talking about. I kept an open mind about being away from my parents and staying with Gramps, Grandma Michi, and Aunt Janet. About the 1001 cranes. About going to church. Meeting new people. What more does she want from me?

  “I know it’s been hard for you. But it’s been hard for me, too.”

  Now did my mom want me to feel sorry for her? In a way, she must have created this, I think. With all her monku, all her stubbornness. She must have driven my father away. This time I don’t cry. I don’t shed one tear.

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIP NO. 8: The last crane, the 1001st one, should be red for good luck.

  Obon Dance

  Every July I go to the Obon festival in Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay, near my other grandparents’ house. Baa-chan dresses me up in a cotton kimono called a yukata (not “yuk-ata,” but “you-kata”) and wraps a bright red tie-dye sash around my waist. I love the sash. It is soft—softer than a pair of stockings, and a lot tougher, too. Baa-chan even puts makeup—well, only mascara and lipstick—on my face.

  Usually a drummer wearing white shorts, a happi coat (looks like the top half of a kimono only manly), and a cloth tied around his head bangs on a huge taiko drum. The sound is so loud and deep that you can feel it in your chest and even down to your fingertips and toes. Really. Dancers circle the drummer. Some of them wear fancy kimonos, while others just dance in jeans and T-shirts.

  I watch the ones in the fancy kimonos, because they know all the steps to the dance. For some dances, you need a round fan and a long, skinny towel. For others, you need these things called kachi-kachi, which are red and blue castanets. If you really know what you are doing, you get to use red-painted curved bamboo things.

  The Obon in Berkeley is fun, so when I hear that Grandma is going to a practice for the Obon dance at the Buddhist temple, I tell her that I want to go, too. It’s been a couple of weeks since the bowling party, and I’ve almost finished Mr. and Mrs. O’s display. Gramps will soon be starting to frame it in the back room. I know that it will turn out even better than the Kawaguchi display. “Good job,” Gramps says, his head partially down. He doesn’t look at me straight in the eyes much anymore, and when he does, it’s like he’s looking through me, not at me.

  I keep writing Tony my secret notes, and I’ve used four Post-it pads in the process. Every time we’re in the car and we pass his uncle’s store, or the middle school on a Sunday, I search for a sign of Tony. He has no idea that my cell phone has been taken away and my mother is watching my every move. She even disconnects my grandparents’ phone at night and puts it on the side of her bed, against the wall, when she goes to sleep.

  I have another reason for wanting to go to the dance rehearsal. Like in those old-time cowboy and Indian movies, maybe the drumming will somehow bring Tony to the Buddhist temple. He’s always skateboarding around town; wouldn’t a bunch of Japanese people dancing in a circle outside draw him and his friends over? Just in case, I bring my three Post-it pads’ worth of words, my poems for Tony, in a plastic bag.

  Grandma Michi, Mom, and I all go to the practice. Aunt Janet says that she needs to work on an order in the shop. Gramps says he feels a little tired, but I know that he’s not into dancing. Usually I’d tease him, but I don’t dare to now.

  The practice is held on the church’s outside concrete basketball court. Some old ladies in blue happi coats are already there. It turns out that most of the people are old—really old, like my grandparents’ age. Most of them are women, too, except for one man who’s dressed in a yukata, even though it’s just a practice, and another guy in jeans, who stands by a taiko.

  “We’re going to start off with the tanko bushi,” a woman, the instructor, calls out. There’s a CD player on a table next to the taiko. The woman, who wears a cotton happi coat and false eyelashes, presses down on the Play button.

  I recognize the music. It’s happy and lively and I like how it makes me feel inside.

  “This is called the coal miner’s dance,” the instructor explains. A circle forms around her and the taiko drummer. The ones who know the dance start on the steps right away. Grandma stands beside me so that I can follow along.

  “Right foot forward first,” she says. “Dig, dig.” She moves her arms together two times as if she’s sweeping the floor in front of her. We repeat on the left side.

  Then she bends her right elbow back toward her shoulder and does the same on the left. Grandma explains to me that we are throwing coal into our baskets. I didn’t even know that Japan had coal.

  We then stagger backward a couple of times—apparently the basket is pretty heavy—then push, push, and finally open our arms as if we are spreading coal on the ground. (Seems pretty messy, if you ask me.) And then clap, clap. Clap.

  A woman is singing our dance song on the CD and I love it when she calls out “a yoi yoi.” It sounds and feels like a yo-yo going back and forth.

  We do this song until our circle goes around two times. Then we learn the gardeners’ dance. The instructor explains to me that some of the songs and dances were created by Japanese Americans, not people in Japan. I can figure that out because the gardeners’ dance song is in English. Grandma says that her father and Gramps’s father were both gardeners. I can’t imagine them having fathers, or maybe I can’t picture either of them being a kid, like me.

  Next is a dance with the long, skinny towels. The dance has a Japanese name, but I’m not sure what it is. Grandma has brought towels for all three of us, but Mom hasn’t been practicing with us. Instead, she stands by the drinking fountain, talking to some lady who looks about her age.

  We start off with the towels hanging loose from our necks, like we are champion runners after a race. I’m a little nervous, because I’ve never done the towel dance before. The music comes on, and we hold the towels out in front of us with two hands, like they’re a sacrifice. Only I’m not doing it right for some reason. The movements go fast and I’m getting lost.

  “No, no, Angela, not like that. Don’t hold the towel so tight.” I see the crease between Grandma Michi’s eyes.

  I try again and she corrects me. “No, Angela, not like that. How many times do I have to go over it with you? You’re so slow sometimes.”

  Her words burn through me. I’m feeling the past weight of all her criticisms related to my origami folding.

  I stop in my tracks, even though everyone else is moving. “Why do you always have to be so mean to me?” I say. I don’t realize how loudly I’m speaking, but it’s enough for the dancers around us to give me funny looks.

  “What are you talking about?” The cotton towel is resting on Grandma’s left shoulder now.

  “Why can’t I do anything right? And why do you have to be so fake and such a bad grandma?”

  Grandma Michi’s marionette mouth drops open. My heart starts racing as if it needs to be somewhere else in a hurry. My feet start moving and soon I’m in a full-out run.

  The happy music keeps playing as I go through the metal gate. My mother must have finally noticed, because I hear her call out “Angela!”

  There’s no question of where I’m going: Tony’s uncle’s store. It feels good to run free and be away from my family. Away from their problems. My problems.

  I’m happy to see the mold green structure, standing out like one of those castles in a goldfish bowl.

  Sweat is dripping from the tip of my nose, and I brush it away with the cotton towel. I stop when I reach the doorway and my eyes have to adjust to the darkness of the store’s insides.

  I expect to see Uncle Carlos behind the counter, but instead, it’s Tony, wearing a red T-shirt with the name of a band on it. I’m so happy—I can’t believe it.

  I start to say something but he’s not alone. An Asian girl with long, straight
hair is handing him some liter bottles of soda to stack behind him. She doesn’t seem to belong inside the liquor store. She’s too pretty to be working there and she doesn’t look like a relative. She purposefully gives him four bottles, and Tony’s overloaded. He drops one, and the plastic container bounces on the cement floor like a bowling pin. The top must have gotten loose, because the bottle bursts open and soda starts to shoot out on the floor. “You—” He tries to grab the girl’s waist but she squirms away with a fake laugh. A girlfriend’s laugh.

  Tony grabs some old newspapers to soak up the spilled soda. He kneels down and then looks up toward the doorway, noticing me for the first time.

  “Angela,” he says as if he is apologizing. The girl squints at me.

  My head is still pulsating from my run. I am so stupid, I think. I thought things that happened to my friends, like Emilie, wouldn’t happen to me. I’m never the reckless one. I’m the one who thinks things through carefully, the quiet one who doesn’t act on impulse or emotion.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” he says.

  I take a few steps back, onto the sidewalk. “I hate you,” I whisper. He probably can’t hear me, but I mean it. I hate every part of him.

  My feet start moving again and I’m halfway down the block.

  I hear Tony. “Angie, I’m sorry.”

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. That word falls into itself and circles like the revolution of skateboard wheels.

  Hot Tears

  The tears are dropping hot and heavy again. I hate my tears. I hate that my face and my eyelids are going to be swollen again, revealing my feelings for all to see. I hate Tony. I hate Gardena. I hate my mom. I hate Grandma. And I really hate my dad.

  The cranes. I hate the cranes. I hate having to fold every last one of them. I hate how Grandma Michi forces me to make them perfect. But nothing’s perfect, Grandma.

  I tear the key from around my neck and try to open the back door. I want to go through that way because they are there: the cranes. The stupid cranes. I want to crush them. Tear up Mr. and Mrs. O’s 1001-cranes display. What does it mean? Nothing. They are just a lie, like everything else.