1001 Cranes (19 page)

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.

I’m finally able to unlock the door and I can see the origami birds shining like gold points on black velvet. Before I can get to them, I notice something else. On the other side of the display is Gramps, hunched over in a chair, with sweat streaming down his face. “An-jay,” he murmurs, “help.”

Flat Soda

My hands are shaking and I’m at the phone, calling 911. “My grandfather thinks he’s having a heart attack,” I say. The operator asks me for our address, and I can barely remember it, but read it off some bills next to the phone. The operator then asks me if Gramps can move both sides of his body. I put the phone down and check and then go back. “Yes,” I tell her. “And he can see okay.”

I listen to what the operator says next and finally get off the phone. I run into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet, which, like everything else, is completely filled—pill bottle stacked upon pill bottle. But I finally find what I’m looking for and run back to Gramps. “Take this.” I hand him an aspirin. I don’t know what it’s supposed to do, but I follow what the operator told me to a tee.

I try to call Mom’s cell, but just get her voice mail. “Come home,” I say. “It’s an emergency.”

I go back to the other room and kneel next to Gramps. “The ambulance’s coming,” I say.

I go into the kitchen, fill a plastic container with a built-in straw with water, and bring it to Gramps. He tries to take a sip but the water just ends up spilling over his face.

We hear the front door opening. “Angie…,” Mom calls out.

“Mom,” I call back.

Mom and Grandma are now in the doorway of the 1001-cranes room.

“What the—” Mom hurries to Gramps’s side. Grandma Michi steps back and I’m afraid she’s going to faint.

“It’s my heart, Grandma,” Gramps calls out.

Grandma Michi steps forward and takes a hold of Gramps’s hand—I’ve never seen them touch each other in this way—and he keeps telling her that he’s okay and the ambulance is on its way.

“Oh no, oh no,” my grandmother murmurs. Her voice isn’t shrill or loud. It’s as flat as old soda that’s been left out too long.

Dental Floss, Anyone?

Grandma Michi gets in the ambulance with Gramps while Mom and I go in Mom’s car to the hospital. My fingertips are as cold as ice. In the mirror on the passenger-side visor, I notice that my face looks greenish.

Mom, surprisingly, is super-calm, and she even manages to smile a little. “It’ll be okay, honey,” she says when she stops at an intersection. She doesn’t seem to say it for me as much as for herself.

We go into the emergency room and Mom waits in line for a few minutes. “We’ll have to go onto another floor; you might have to be in the waiting room for a while,” she says.

We take an elevator and Mom tells me to sit in a waiting room that has a television set mounted on the wall. A family is watching a program in a language I don’t understand. Two of them are boys, probably around six and seven, and they are carrying half-empty plastic containers of Gatorade, one neon yellow and the other blue. They are bored out of their minds and whine and pull at each other’s T-shirts.

There are some magazines in a corner and I leaf through them, but they are all super-old, with the best places to golf in Scotland and tips about how to make traditional Christmas decorations.

After a half hour, I see a familiar face peering into the waiting room. It’s Mrs. O, wearing white slacks and sandals that show off her painted toenails. Before I can ask her what she’s doing here, she slips into the plastic chair next to me. She squeezes my wrist. “I spoke to your aunt Janet,” she says.

Mrs. O doesn’t follow that up with anything else. She doesn’t say that it’s going to be all right, because we both really don’t know. She just looks around the waiting room—a box without any windows—at the loud television set, the brothers, and the old tattered magazines. “Not much to do in here.”

I nod.

Mrs. O rummages through her purse, which is as fat as an old-time doctor’s bag. “Look what I have.” She holds up a package of origami paper. “Kept extra ones just in case.”

Mrs. O takes the golf magazine and places it on her lap as a makeshift table. I sit cross-legged on the floor.

“This will be for your grandfather,” Mrs. O says as she begins to fold. “Our little origami prayers.”

I fold on top of the decorating magazine and I’m surprised by how easily I can make cranes now. Mrs. O’s a little slower than me, but she makes sure that her folds are razor sharp, just the way Grandma likes them.

The family takes a break from the noisy television set to see what we are doing. The whiny kids with runny noses slowly creep closer and closer to me, and Mrs. O nods to them and hands them each a crisp golden folding paper.

And soon I am teaching them, step by step, what to do. We go through Mrs. O’s origami paper, so I open my plastic bag of Post-it poems and use those squares to fold, too. You can’t see the full words anymore, just “Y-E” in “yellow” and “M-O-N” in “cinnamon,” but I like it better that way. When we are done with those, we begin tearing the pages of the old magazines to make more squares. I feel like I’m doing something wrong, but Mrs. O started it, so I suppose it’s okay.