The Magic of Ordinary Days (18 page)

Obviously, I had misjudged. “I understand.”

What Ray didn't know was that I had planned to let Franklin curl up with me on the bed during cold winter nights. A few days later I was able to laugh a bit—to myself, of course—when I thought of the reaction I might have received to that idea.

One day, soon after the beet harvest had been completed, I drove out to Camp Amache to have a fitting for my suit. As I drove east, the land became drier, the grasses shorter, and the plant life more spare and stunted. The land looked more suitable for grazing than for growing, and soon, all about me spread away pasture land and bare prairie, small herds of cattle, and large bunches of spongy gray sheep.

As I approached the camp, I saw that Amache was huge. Home to more than seven thousand evacuees, it rose out of the dirt, a city picked up by tornado winds and plunked down and away from the rest of civilization. Fenced in with barbed wire and watched over by two tall security towers that didn't seem to be manned at the time, the camp contained rowed-out, one-story buildings all uniform and similar in appearance to military barracks. I had hoped these quarters would be superior to what I'd seen at the farm outpost; however, the same feeling of shock and sorrow came over me here, exactly as before. I watched men, women, and children milling about the buildings, smiling and bowing to each other.

The “Yellow Peril,” they had been called. “Nips and Japs.”

I met a uniformed guard just inside the gate and told him I was to meet Rose and Lorelei Umahara. He asked me where I came from, but he seemed to be making conversation rather than inquiring out of security concerns. He moved slowly and easily, as someone does who feels little stress in his or her work. It was clear there wasn't much concern about escape or danger at Camp Amache. I found out later that only two officers and seventeen men were stationed here to guard the residents. Most of the camp management the evacuees handled for themselves.

A few minutes later, Rose and Lorelei came walking up. They smiled and spoke to the guard, then took me inside, down rows of barracks, and finally to the quarters assigned to their family. Outside I saw a carefully laid out rock garden with stones arranged together by color, size, and even by shapes. They had transplanted some native cholla cacti, sage plants, pincushion cacti, and prickly pears in among the rocks and smooth stones, making it into something neat and attractive. They had turned useless stones and ordinary plants, waste to most of us, into a garden of spare beauty.

Rose gestured out to the desert. “Our father borrowed a wheel-barrow, and we hauled these rocks in from all around.”

“I thought he would kill us in the process,” Lorelei whispered and then laughed.

“It's lovely. It was worth your effort.” But it couldn't have compared to the green gardens they had left behind in California.

Once inside the door to their home, even Lorelei became quiet. The first thing that struck me was how small it was—the space assigned for four adults to live in, their “apartment,” as they called it, couldn't have been more than twenty by twenty-four feet. But just as they had done with the outside garden, they had transformed it. The interior was a cheerful, tidy home. It looked as if they had put up walls, then painted and papered them. They had also carved out some niches in the corners and added shelves lined with family photos and built Japanese-style screens to cover the windows. From my readings, I had learned that each internee had been allowed to bring only two bags of belongings to camp and no furniture, but despite that, the Uma haras had managed to furnish this home with pieces made out of crates and scrap wood, the end result as neat and comfortable as humanly possible. In one corner was a table covered with a yellow-and-red-flowered tablecloth and tucked under with chairs. Along the wall sat a dresser and a double-decker bed. The room was lit with two shaded lamps. One corner held a folding screen framed with carved wood and decorated with a Japanese scene.

The furniture, the lampshades, even the floors were spotless, as if just recently polished, dusted, and swept out with a broom. This camp and the land around it was a place of endless sand and dust, much drier even than the farm where I lived, yet they kept it more than habitable. I could see no running water in the room and only a coal stove for heat, yet the room felt warm.

Rose and Lorelei spoke in hushed tones as they introduced me to their father, Masaji, and their mother, Itsu, who were both well dressed in American garb, both smooth-skinned, short of stature, but strong in appearance.

They nodded to me as we met. “What an honor that you have come to our home,” said Masaji. His shirt was purest white and pressed.

Itsu offered me hot tea, which I accepted, then she began pulling out pinstriped, gray wool fabric already pieced together using broad hand stitches. As she held the garment up to me, I saw the only sign of her age—tiny vertical lines on her upper lip. The rest of her skin was unmarked, and her hair was as black as her daughters‘, long, pulled back, and coiled at the back of her head. As she worked, I noticed three majorette uniforms decorated with gold braid and brass buttons hanging on the wall. Lorelei told me later that her parents were making the uniforms for the camp's high school band. Itsu ushered me behind the screen, then all four of them left the “apartment” so I could try on the garment in privacy. As I was slipping myself into the pieced suit, as they waited for me beyond the door, I wondered about their sense of privacy. All four of them, after all, slept inside the same room.

After I was dressed, Rose, Lorelei, and their parents returned to work on the fitting. Itsu and Rose were the only ones to touch me in any personal way—they took the measurements along the hem, across my breasts, and my enlarging waist, whereas Masaji held back and gave them quiet directions, sometimes in English and sometimes in Japanese. Rose and Lorelei had told me before that their parents came to this country as children after having already learned the Japanese language and customs. Their parents' parents had been friendly for years, had come across the ocean at approximately the same time, and the two children had always been friends, had always seemed destined to marry.

It was their mother and father who had suffered most from the disparity between cultures, Rose and Lorelei once told me. As Itsu pinned the fabric for a perfect fit, I remembered. Because they weren't born in this country, they couldn't become citizens, although they had lived most of their lives in the U.S. When Rose and Lorelei were born on this soil, they purposefully chose for them first names common in America, taught them English at home, and sent them to public schools, where they were expected to excel. Obviously Masaji and Itsu had hoped to provide better opportunities for their daughters than had been afforded to them.

As they continued to work on the fitting, I studied the family photos on the shelves across from me. Beside them was another photo of Masaji standing and smiling with a celebrity whose face I recognized but couldn't name. I remembered Rose and Lorelei once telling me that their father had made suits for famous people in Los Angeles.

Later, from the compartment next to theirs, Rose and Lorelei's maternal grandparents came over to meet me. They spoke little English, but instead bowed to me and smiled; then we sat and shared a cup of hot tea. Their grandmother was one of the tiniest women I'd ever seen, with small flitting eyes like those of a bird. She wore a long, silky kimono and cork-soled slippers that slapped silently on her soles as she walked.

Afterward, Rose and Lorelei led me away for a walk about the camp.

“Your suit should be ready for the holidays,” Rose said.

“I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.” If only I had a place to wear it.

We looked inside the mess hall where Lorelei said they ate their meals. At an empty table, an older woman was teaching a group of younger women an art form called
bon-kei.
Rose told me the woman had learned it in Japan. Sand was a vital ingredient and because sand was in no short supply at Amache, word had spread throughout the camp, and the old woman had ended up with many new students of the art. We stopped to watch for a few minutes as the students worked on creating miniature landscapes inside a tray—some of them of mountain, desert, or beach, and many of them of imaginary scenes in Japan. Each one was different. In another area of the mess hall, high school students were working on their yearbook pages.

We walked back out into the sunlight. “It mustn't seem like much of a problem, but I don't have enough to do on the farm,” I said to Rose as we left. “Would the
bon-kei
teacher allow someone from outside the camp in her class?”

“She would,” Rose replied. “She would see it as an honor.”

“Perhaps I'll join a class, then.”

Lorelei said, “Our mother can teach you
ikebana,
Japanese flower arranging.”

“It would honor her, too,” Rose added.

They looked at me in a new way, expectantly. They had asked so little of me before and given so much. “Then that's what I'll do. I'll learn flower arranging instead.”

Rose's face glowed. “We'll tell our mother.”

Even Lorelei looked pleased.

A moment later, we walked onward and Lorelei said, “I understand what you mean, Livvy. We're bored here, too. The high school kids call it ‘waste time,' and we've too much of it.”

Rose spoke up. “Not all of us are bored. I'm taking advantage of the free time and learning the tea ceremony from our grandmother.”

Lorelei shot me a sideways glance. “Even though she doesn't really want to.”

Rose turned to me. “It's different for us. We can't refuse the wishes of our elders.”

“We must please, that's true,” Lorelei said. “But I'm never quite pleasing enough.” She looked away, out to the softly blowing desert.

As they guided me onward, I began to notice the same thing I'd noticed in Trinidad—the lack of young men. I saw some high school seniors holding a war bond drive, and plenty of young boys running around playing cowboys and Indians. Young girls played with dolls, older men engaged in hobbies or worked, and older women joined groups of quiet conversation over knitting. But the young men had vanished from this place. Rose told me that since 1943, Nisei men had been able to enlist in the all-Nisei 442nd Regiment, now engaged in the fighting in Italy and France. Camp Amache had the highest percentage of eligible males inducted into the armed services, their cousin among them. Plenty of Japanese American young men were anxious and ready to prove their loyalty to the U.S., even with their lives. Already highly decorated, since October 15, the 442nd had led the rescue of the famous “lost battalion” and were then on their way to Germany.

Now I could clearly see the reason for Lorelei's longing for male company. She and Rose were surrounded by older parents and grandparents and by much younger people still in school, but by few others their own age.

Rose showed me to the latrine after I told her I needed to find a bathroom. I entered a community building where toilets sat rowed out next to each other and pieces of plywood had been put up by shy women to afford some bit of privacy. I sat at the last toilet and covered my nose against the odor.

Years later, I would remember that smell. It is odd the things we remember in our older days. From that day onward, I would also remember other things about my first visit to Amache. The endless arc of a sky bigger than earth, the taste of dust on my teeth, rocks arranged in rows, hushed conversations, and the gentle laughter of shy women. Not all of it bad or unpleasant, but all of it was tamped with a sense of isolation and restriction.

How dreadfully their lives had changed.

Moments later, as I readjusted my clothing and prepared to exit the latrine, a sickness, disbelief turned into nausea, came over me. I'd left myself somewhere else and wasn't really in this camp anymore. That way, Rose and Lorelei and their sweet family couldn't be here, either.

Eighteen

In 1944, the winter came quietly. Instead of raging storms, we had heavy, silent snowfalls that covered the dry grasses and the overturned fields with miles of powder.

One of the reasons untouched snow is so breathtaking is that it‘s, by nature, so fleeting. Even the act of making those first tracks mars it; then on the warmer days in between storms, it gets icy, later slushy, then eventually melts away. But on those mornings when it spreads away, velvety white and sparkling, nothing's finer.

During my childhood, often my family would drive up into the Rockies after the first storm, and there we found ourselves quite alone, as most of the tourists were long gone by that time. We explored the quiet roads back in the days before the bans were placed on pleasure driving. We listened to empty echoes, trudged down roads and out into meadows, seeking out the deer and elk herds that would have to survive the winter season most likely with little food. On Berthoud Pass, we strapped on oak skis to glide down the slopes. And for once, I excelled in something other than studies, and my sisters did not. My father, who skied better than us all, would take off, fast-gliding down the slopes, and only I could come close to keeping up with him. I remember how he would look back over his shoulder at me as I tried to gain on him, and he'd shout out, “Bravo, girl!”