Laughter pattered across the room.
“Thank you for sharing, Mrs. Moto.”
She sat down while everyone clapped.
Silence followed. But gradually, others came forward and told their stories, too. People only ten years older than Rita talked about being pulled out of school and ostracized by kids and teachers for no longer being Canadian, branded as the enemy race. There were stories of terrifying train rides as women, children, and old people were sent to ghost towns and told to rebuild their lives in crumbling, mouse-infested buildings.
Not everyone wanted to talk. Rita could sense the tension rising from the tightly crossed arms of the lady next to her. How had Lily felt as she’d clung to the wall, forced to confront her own unspeakable memories? Rita had never really thought about the full extent of what her mother had gone through — the upheaval, the humiliation, the loss of everything familiar. Heat emanated from people’s cheeks as they evaded each other’s glances and then timidly, uncertainly, looked back.
Could the tide of memories have triggered emotions Lily couldn’t handle? Was that why she’d walked out of her life?
In fact, a couple of people were leaving right now. They edged toward the door and slipped out while someone was in the midst of speaking.
At last things were winding down. Over cups of tepid green tea, people stood around for another half hour, chatting, waiting. Many of them wanted to talk to Mark. All the folks who’d been too shy to tell their stories to the group wanted to tell their stories to him privately so they, too, could be touched by his amber gaze. Rita perched on the edge of the sofa, wondering when she’d get a word in edgewise. Finally, the stragglers left.
Mark flopped down on the couch beside her. “Okay, I’m pooped. Sorry that took so long.”
“It’s okay. I enjoyed listening to everyone’s stories.” Enjoyment hardly got at the tangle of emotions she’d experienced, but she didn’t know what else to say and now felt like an idiot.
“You mentioned you wanted to ask me about something.”
She nodded, tongue-tied.
“Come on. You’ve had me curious all night.”
“What do you say I tell you about it over a beer?”
Rita followed Mark’s Jeep to a bar at Yonge and Lawrence, one of those places with a “ye olde” pub sign and worn velvety benches and sports pendants on the walls. They ordered beers, a veggie plate, and basket of chicken wings before she realized that wings would mean licking her fingers and looking disgusting. (Was this a date she’d unthinkingly hurled herself into? It kind of felt like one.) She sipped her beer — not wanting to drink faster than him — and nibbled celery. Then she got worried that Mark would think her a prude, so she attacked a saucy wing with gusto.
So far he’d told her quite a bit about kinship structures among pre-Columbian societies in Panama in the sixteenth century. Apparently, a world of information could be gleaned by excavating the remains of these peoples’ dump sites. She pictured Mark, brown as a berry, a baseball cap shading his face, as he sifted through the rubble, eyes alight with childlike wonder. Indiana Jones. But shorter. Mark really wasn’t much taller than she was; they were almost eye to eye, standing. Normally, she was attracted to taller guys. Was she attracted to Mark? Or was she just falling to pieces and looking for an ego boost in the form of male attention? Could he tell what she was thinking, as she nodded and commented — intelligently, she hoped? Were the same convoluted self-doubts running through his mind?
He was a pretty outgoing guy. He seemed easygoing; though, as they talked further, she began to see another side. He’d grown up in Toronto. Then he’d been away for many years doing his Ph.D. in Pittsburgh and peddling his trade at universities and colleges all over North America. He was older than she’d initially thought. He’d only moved back to Toronto last summer, when U of T hired him on a two-year contract. His job wasn’t likely to become tenure-track, so he didn’t quite know what the future had in store. Sounded tired of the gypsy life. Maybe that was why he’d gotten involved in redress; the activist work seemed to have a grounding effect.
“But enough about me,” he said, suddenly. “You’re an art teacher, right?”
“Some days I try to think of myself as one. I go in there and do my impression of one, and the kids don’t know any different.”
“Not your passion?”
“It’s not that…. I really do enjoy teaching. Some of the time, anyway.” She rolled her eyes. “But I guess you’re right. Not my original passion.”
“Which was?”
“Painting. Though I haven’t picked up a brush in ages. More important things to do, like paying the bills.”
She thought about the stack of canvasses she’d been lugging around for years. Wasn’t it time to put that stuff out on the curb? The other day, while unpacking, some masochistic impulse made her peek at the painting on top: a square of pellucid blueness, blurry around the edges, Rothko-like (at least that was what she’d been aiming for). A slip of whimsical sky melting away. A clothesline had been sketched across: pantyhose and lingerie hung down like gossamer wings, dead, insubstantial.
She signalled to the waiter that she needed another drink.
“So did you grow up in the Japanese-Canadian community?” Mark asked.
“What community?”
“Oh, you know, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, the Buddhist church. Didn’t they have some annual picnic?”
“You’d know better than I would. My grandfather was involved in that stuff for a while, but after my mother went downhill, we kept to ourselves.”
“What happened to your mom?”
“She never was the same after the war, I guess.” That was a euphemism, if ever there was one.
“If it makes you feel any better, I only went to the picnic once. I didn’t have such a great time. Kids kept asking me what the heck I was doing there. There weren’t so many hapa kids, back then. I was a person in a marginal position, whose ambiguous status troubles the lines of demarcation in the social system, as we say in my field. Since marginal figures are credited with having uncontrollable, menacing powers, they’re considered dangerous.” He made a fearsome face. His tone suggested a playful, ironic distance from the jargon he was using.
It was true that Mark didn’t look very Japanese. Was that why he’d jumped on the redress bandwagon? To reclaim some sense of his long-lost origins? Then again, how Japanese was she, really? “Japanese,” whatever that meant. Cal had once told her that she didn’t know how to cook rice properly. (But he was Korean. Were Korean and Japanese folks supposed to fluff their rice differently?) Maybe she was also a person in a marginal position, whose ambiguous status troubled the lines of demarcation — whatever that meant. She certainly didn’t feel like she had any special, menacing powers.
“You’re really good at leading the house meetings, getting people to open up. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“All we’re doing is creating a safe space. For so long no one talked about anything — it was like those memories of the internment years never even existed. Massive blackouts, collective amnesia. Just put it all behind you, block it all out, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move the fuck on. The first step in rebuilding community is allowing those memories to surface.”
Blackouts, amnesia, repressed memories….
“My mom gets confused sometimes. Ever since I was a kid. She’ll look at me at times like she’s forgotten I’m her daughter.” She searched Mark’s face for signs of shock, fascination.
“That must’ve been frightening for a little kid.”
All she saw was gentle concern. Tears smarted her eyes.
As he handed her a napkin, his hand brushed against her wrist. She wondered if he were the kind of guy who often attracted women on the verge of meltdowns.
“It sounds like your mom’s had quite the go of it.”
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“That’s putting it mildly.”
“How’s everything going with the search?”
“Oh, God. Don’t even ask.” She began telling him about her visit with Mr. Fujita and the photographs that Lily was supposedly in possession of.
“That’s fabulous for the JCNA if she has them. They’ll be great for the book. Valuable artifacts. Though I’m curious about why the pictures matter so much to you. You really think they’re going to lead you to Lily?”
“I don’t know.” He was right, she was grasping at straws. And yet, her gut instinct that the photos were somehow important persisted — if for no other reason than she needed to understand her mother.
“Where was your mom interned, Rita?”
“Actually, that’s what I wanted to ask you about.” She couldn’t believe she’d gotten so sidetracked. “Do you know anything about Matanzas?”
“The Matanzas Riot.”
“What? A riot happened there?”
Mark tilted his head back, inventorying his brain. “Yeah, it was one of the few instances of violent resistance, I think. But most of the stuff I’ve researched pertains to camps in Canada, not the States. I’ve read about the Matanzas Riot somewhere, but the details escape me.”
“I thought you’re supposed to be some hotshot expert, Professor Edo.”
She expected a witty comeback, but he kept silent. A moment later, he said, “I can help you find out more if you’d like.”
“Yeah?”
“Too bad Robarts isn’t open now. Summer hours.”
He acted like it would be perfectly normal to head to the library at a quarter to ten, like a couple of caffeine-fuelled undergrads ready to pull an all-nighter.
“How about tomorrow afternoon?” he said brightly.
She hadn’t realized that he’d suggested the afternoon because they’d spend the morning lounging in bed, her cheek pressed against the nest of golden down on his chest. If she liked the way morning light streamed through her new bedroom window, she liked it all the more as the rays danced over Mark’s sleeping face and illuminated the mottled freckles she hadn’t noticed before. She wondered whether he was the kind of prof who slept around with different grad students each week. She hoped not. It was rare for her to meet a guy she could talk to so easily (and who was so skilled, in other ways, with his tongue). But that was the muddling thing about sex: it could make you feel like you’d known someone for a very long time, like you were old childhood friends or something.
Last night, afterwards, her body languid, she’d told him more about Lily’s disappearance and erratic behaviour over the years. It was a relief to let go and open up to someone and even indulge in a good cry (under normal circumstances, she was not the kind of woman who cried after sex, she let Mark know with a laugh). He just cuddled and listened with his usual calmness, and after she’d exhausted herself, a heavy restfulness came over her limbs and eyelids. The first true rest she’d had in days. Although it was accompanied by a wallop of guilt — since Lily was still out there, lost, God knew where — she luxuriated in that moment of stillness, the cusp of sleep.
Fifteen
The head honcho, Mr. Howells himself, stood behind his desk and lit a cigarette. His pudgy face was damp, wisps of silver hair stuck to his forehead. He was standing close to his secretary, the pretty one with copper curls, their voices so low Lily couldn’t make out anything. A handkerchief came out and mopped the upper lip, but his face still shimmered, a massive, dewy peach.
The American flag had been pinned to the wall behind him. Line upon line of blank white stars that confused her with their emptiness, their non-existent glitter, their geometric perfection.
Every so often they’d glance at Lily nervously, as though she were a new breed of criminal they hadn’t figured out how to interrogate.
Everything that had come before stretched out like sleep without dreams, black and amorphous, uncertain in duration. A jumble of inchoate, muzzled voices. Humming, humming, always humming. If only that blanket of black vibrating air could be thick enough to swaddle her senses forever.
Running her hands through her lank hair, she extracted scraps of sagebrush. She smelled of oily, matted fur. Fingernails broken, caked with dirt. How awful the way people looked at her now. What would the Cherry Blossom judges say? They wouldn’t recognize her — not an unfamiliar feeling. There were times when she’d stare at the eyes watching her in the glass and feel they belonged to someone else: a fleeting friend, a sometimes enemy.
And yet it was that other self that seemed most real, that beckoned to her. As if she could let herself drift away from this dirty, degraded body, and follow that other, more forceful presence….
The door opened and the doctor charged in.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Howells said.
“I’m her doctor.”
“We need to talk to her alone. We need to get her on the record about what happened.”
“What has she said?”
“Nothing. Just keeps repeating she doesn’t remember a thing.”
Then the images started to surface, like tattered photographs — the masked men, the construction site, Frank’s endless moans — but she didn’t want to piece it all together. Eyes clenched, memory shuttered. If only everything would fade from her consciousness, recede into the abyss forever.
Flecks of blood congealed around her fingernails, bitten to the quick. A man was beaten. Frank Isaka. She couldn’t resist putting a finger in her mouth to tear at a morsel of skin. A welcome intrusion of pain, of guilt. She lured him to that awful place, where Kaz beat him to the ground. Oh, God, what if Frank isn’t even alive? The taste of blood, salty and strong.
“Is he all right? Frank?”
The doctor nodded. “The attacker must’ve run away when he heard you screaming. You probably saved his life, Lily.”
She hugged her arms around herself, trembling.
How she longed for her purple kimono, not the one she’d worn on stage, but the shabby, soft, ruined one, the one she’d practiced in, the one her mother had left behind. She could see it hanging in the empty closet. In the shadows it appeared almost black, and if she buried her nose deep in its folds, a hint of something aromatic and ashy made her remember burning chrysanthemum petals, the incense her mother used to make offerings. It made everything circle back to the same warm, safe place, the girl she was in the beginning….
“You see?” the doctor said. “I can get her talking. She’s just frightened. Please give me a few minutes alone with the girl.”
“If you were any other Jap doctor, I wouldn’t even consider it. You’ve got five minutes. Not a second longer.”
Mr. Howells and his secretary walked out. But Lily couldn’t believe they’d truly left; they were standing outside, teacups pressed against the door.
“Who were they?”
“Who were who?”
“Lily. The men. When you came to me, you were screaming your head off about some men attacking Frank. You told us where to find him.”
She didn’t remember that part. It seemed there was nothing there to remember.
“So, Lily, who were they?”
“They were wearing masks.”
“Masks? You didn’t catch any identifying features?”
The truth would devastate him. Yet she had no more energy for creative lies that risked turning into the most horrible prophecies. “One of them was Kaz, I think. He was with Shig and Akira.”
The doctor’s eyes looked startled, exposing the fragile geometry of his cheekbones. Yet only a moment later, not so startled, just horrified, sunken, afraid.
Out it all came in a jumble of fragments, whatever she could manage to cobble together. How Kaz had asked her to warm up to Frank. Take him on a romantic stroll. For what reason, she had no idea. Until. Until it was all too late. She felt a wobble o
f nausea, her breath heavy and sour.
The doctor will know what to do. He’ll take care of me.
But he just kept staring into space. Where was the tenacious, self-assured man she’d come to rely on?
“So what do you want me to do with all this information?” he said at last.
“Make things right?”
“You no longer care about Kaz?”
“No … it’s not that.”
“Are you even sure of what you saw? The men were wearing masks, you said it yourself — they could have been anyone.”
She could see by the mixture of hurt and hostility in his eyes how desperately he needed to believe it. She couldn’t bear it; she simply couldn’t bear to shatter his hopes. Her role was to safeguard that good image of Kaz: a boy who might be full of wayward impulses, but who could still become a great man. The naive optimism that the doctor had often teased her about, that was what had drawn him to her and made him take her under his wing. So now it was her turn to be the Strong One. Tsuyo Ka Ko, as her mother used to call her. The voice of the Strong One gathered force like the bright white asteroid that had descended on their front lawn all those years ago.
“Maybe you’re right. They could have been anyone.”
A gentle slackening in the air between them. Perhaps he was able to see she was lying. And he was grateful. It was a lie that might somehow benefit the greater good, surely, wasn’t it? A hush surrounded them as they watched each other, joined in this new, oppressive intimacy.
Voices swirled around her, foggy and formless. The room brightened and faded and brightened and faded again. Cool fingers stroked her forehead, lulling her to numbness.
Aunt Haruko hovered above and spooned forth rice porridge, washed down with powdered milk. Sometimes she couldn’t keep anything down. Although this woman was taking care of her, Lily could sense her reluctance, disapproval. Her bright, inauspicious stares.
Muffled, singsongy laughter behind. (But how on earth could it be coming from behind? She was all alone in bed, wasn’t she?) Nevertheless, someone was talking about her — pointing, giggling. She was sure of it. It didn’t matter if they were invisible. The nattering girls gathered around as their ringleader’s voice pierced the air with awful clarity: “Our little Cherry Blossom Queen’s gotten herself into a bit of trouble. Who’s gonna take care of her now?”
After the Bloom Page 17
