1001 Cranes (4 page)

“It’s going to go by so quickly, Angie. The summer’s going to be over before you know it,” Mom says. Then she turns onto her side, her back toward me. The streetlight outside bleeds a thin line of silver onto the wall above the drapes, and I see the outline of Mom’s narrow shoulders, first tight and still, and then rising and falling, ever so slightly, matching the beat of her breath.

Poisoned Phone

She’s ready to go when I wake up the next morning. Seeing her freshly washed hair and her car keys in her hand makes me feel desperately lonely.

“It’s just for the summer,” she reminds me again. “It’ll be best. For everyone. Really.”

I now feel like kicking and screaming and telling my mom not to leave me here. But instead I nod as Gramps, Grandma, and Aunt Janet stand by the door.

I have been taught well. No
monku.
I stand in front of my mother and let her briefly embrace me, her chin cutting into the soft fold of my neck.

“I have something for you,” she then says, revealing a red cell phone in her hand. “An early birthday present.” It’s as shiny as a fresh candy apple. I don’t like red. My mother knows that. She must have bought the phone in a hurry. Or else she wasn’t thinking.

“I’ve already programmed my cell phone number. And your father’s.” Two different numbers, two separate lives.

I wave good-bye from the sidewalk. After the car turns the corner, I take a big breath through my nose. And then another and another. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot smell the smog.

M
ICHI’S
1001-C
RANES
F
OLDING
T
IP
N
O
. 2: Select an origami paper with a color that is vibrant, bright, and hard to miss. Gold and silver are the best.

Three Kinds of
Kami

I know that there’s not just one kind of grandma. I know this because I met Nana, the grandmother of my best friend, Emilie, when she was visiting from New York City. Nana’s hair was short—real short, like a businessman’s—and as white as a polar bear’s coat. She wore huge round earrings from Africa and brightly colored clothes that had no zippers or buttons. When she spoke to us, she got right in our faces; the rims of her red-framed glasses almost hit our cheeks. She wanted to know everything about us—whether we’d had boyfriends (Emilie, yes, for two weeks; and me, no, never), whether our school taught sex education, and whether we regularly read (Emilie, no, except for celebrity magazines; and me, yes, especially manga). She kept telling us that girls needed to learn skills and make money; they couldn’t depend on men, and besides, women outlived men. Emilie was totally embarrassed, but I thought Nana was funny. After that first interrogation, Emilie made sure her nana never ever met her friends again.

I’ve also had firsthand experience with my grandma on the Kato side, my dad’s mom. My cousins and I call her Baa-chan—yeah, like a sheep crying out to another sheep. My grandpa on that side is called Jii-chan. Jii-chan and Baa-chan live in the East Bay near Berkeley. Baa-chan’s fingers are kind of bent, but she doesn’t let that stop her from pinching my arms and cheeks. She buys me stuff all the time, but she keeps the price tags on everything, because she knows that her taste isn’t the same as mine.

Even though we call her Baa-chan, Dad’s mom knows nothing about Japan. Nothing. She and Jii-chan, have a Japanese scroll in their living room and sometimes she wears clothing made of kimono material, but she always tells us, “I’m pure USA, born and bred. Hundred percent American.”

If you’re 100 percent, I think, why are we calling you Baa-chan? And why did you beat all that
monku
stuff into Dad’s head?

Grandma Michi is really different from Baa-chan. She never touches me unless it’s to push me along so I’ll walk faster. She doesn’t tell us stories about living on a farm and catching rabbits in the summertime. I don’t really know anything about Grandma Michi.

But Grandma Michi does know a lot about Japan. I asked her once if she had ever lived there, and she gave me a long, cold look, as if I had accused her of being a Nazi. “No, never,” she said, barely looking at me.

Then how come you know so much?
I wanted to ask her. That’s how it is with Grandma Michi. It’s like you’re walking in a minefield and you don’t know when the bombs might go off right underneath you. That’s why I’ve learned to keep quiet and watch.

Right now Grandma Michi has me sitting at the counter at Gramps’s flower shop. She has spent the past hour talking all about 1001 cranes. Some of it is actually interesting.

She explains to me that the tradition of a thousand cranes goes back to a long time ago, when Japanese people walked around with samurai swords.

“Origami” is the combination of two words:
“ori,”
meaning “to fold,” and
“gami,”
“paper.” “But
‘gami’
is really
‘kami,’
” she explains. “When the Japanese say ‘paper,’ they say
‘kami,’
not
‘gami.’
”

“Well, why don’t they just say ‘orikami’?” I ask.

“Sometimes when they combine, they change the sounds a little so it’s easier to say the word. But
‘kami’
can also mean ‘hair’ or it can mean ‘god.’ So you have to be careful.”

Careful of what? I wonder. It isn’t like I’m going to be walking around saying “I want a piece of
kami
to write on. I need to brush my
kami. Kami
bless you.” I don’t dare verbalize my thoughs, because Grandma isn’t the type to take kindly to jokes. And she is in an especially bad mood right now.

I am having my first crane-folding lesson in the flower shop, the 1001 cranes’ “first base of business,” Grandma tells me. This is where we snag most of our new customers. If they need flowers for their wedding or anniversary, they often need a 1001-cranes display. Back at the house is where we make the displays.

My lesson with Grandma is not going well. She has created a D pile and even an F pile for the ones that don’t make her cut.

“Always match the edges. You can’t go wrong if you go from there,” Grandma Michi says, peering over my elbow. “And no white should show,” she repeats for the tenth time, as if revealing white is as bad as letting someone see your underwear.

Why don’t they just make origami paper that is colored on both sides, instead of leaving one side white? That would get rid of the “white” problem for sure.

The most boring part of origami is making folds and then unfolding them. “Now you have guiding lines,” Grandma says. From these lines you can flip the paper and make more complicated folds. So it begins: fold the square piece of paper in half, like a sandwich, and then open. Fold it in half in the other direction and then open. Then it starts to get a little trickier: fold two diagonal corners together to form a triangle, open, and do the same with the other corners. All the while, watch those edges and make sure the white doesn’t show. Grandma is fanatical about the folded corners. They have to be as sharp as the point of a knife. If they aren’t, the cranes are thrown into the D pile or the F pile to go straight to crane hell.

Once the guiding lines are created, the hard part comes. You have to fold all the insides into each other to create a smaller square that opens up like a flower. As I flip the paper and make all the folds and corners, I feel as though my belly is going through the same strange movements.

I am attempting my eleventh bird—an F—when the bell attached to the top of the door rings. A customer has come to pick up arrangements for a fund-raiser. “I’ll need to help him load up his van,” Grandma Michi says to me, wiping her hands on her apron. “Watch the shop for me, all right?”

Before I can
monku,
Grandma disappears into the back room and goes out the back door. I sigh and study the dreary storefront. Linoleum squares, in a pattern of swirled tan and white like cold coffee with curdled cream, line the floor. The shop is really clean—Grandma makes sure of that—but still it seems crowded.

One metal stand holds greeting cards: “Happy Anniversary,” “Happy Birthday,” “Get Well,” and, of course, “In Sympathy.” Gramps’s customers must be into sickness and death, because there are more of those cards than anything else. They are all depressing, no cartoon characters or bright colors. Instead, they feature stiff irises or ugly lilies that look fake and especially out of place in a flower shop.

On the opposite side of the store, next to the counter, is a long freezer with a sliding glass door. Inside are Grandpa’s masterpieces; I understand why people travel far for his arrangements. A dozen perfect roses in a glass vase. The long stems, smooth and thornless, are straight as needles and positioned as carefully as fake-pearl pins in a bride’s fancy hairdo. Each bud is partly open, a beautiful woman’s red lips. Another arrangement is more fun: blue flowers, with edges like baby bonnets, placed underneath a spray of white-shaped bells and dazzled with daisies, each petal outstretched as if happy to be alive—at least for now. In the corner is a Hawaiian number, tropicals that look like an exotic display of animals: bright orange beaks, the furry nose of a woolly mammoth, and red feathery crowns.

The wooden counter I sit at is worn and smooth, probably from all the times my grandparents have slid floral arrangements across it to their customers. Gramps keeps his tools neatly to one side, in a shoe box. A funny circular metal tool that wraps around stems of roses to dethorn them. Green floral tape. Pruning shears. Stacked beside the box are two photo albums—one of flower arrangements, and the other of 1001-cranes displays.

To keep my folded cranes clean, Grandma makes me use a large cutting board that looks like it has been pulled from the counter in someone’s kitchen. I’m not quite sure if my efforts are just practice or will be used in someone’s 1001-cranes display. With the edge of my fingernail, I crease the folded square and then fold the sides to meet a line in the middle. The resulting shape resembles a gold kite waiting to be released in the wind.

The bell rings again, and I expect to see Grandma. Instead, it’s a black girl a little younger than me. She’s swimming in a white martial arts outfit that looks like a canvas robe and pants. There’s an orange belt around her middle. Her hair is puffy yet neat—like two loaves of french bread braided together.

“You’re Auntie Michi’s granddaughter,” she says.

Auntie Michi? I can’t imagine Grandma Michi ever being an “auntie.” First of all, she doesn’t have any sisters or brothers that I know of. And second of all, I picture aunties as being soft and gentle, smelling of perfume. Definitely not Grandma Michi.

I wait to see if the girl is going to buy something, but from the way she walks around, I know that she’s just here to waste time. I ignore her and concentrate on my latest crane. I take the kite shape and bend the top of it down. A couple of swift swipes of the fingernail to ensure a sharp line, and then open it all up again to the folded square. Now is the toughest challenge, tougher than anything that has come before: lift the bottom corner to form the shape of a baby bird’s open mouth, and finally, close to a diamond shape. Half of the diamond is slit in half, and I know that the slit needs to face the bottom. Fold the sides to the middle again. These folds are not guiding lines but one step from the finale. I have the head and the tail now; I just need to fold up and then in. With my last two cranes, I was bogged down by an F-rated lumpy head or crooked tail, but this one is different. The neck of the crane remains elegant and straight, its folded head demurely lowered. Where is Grandma? I have just folded a perfect crane, worthy of the A pile. I lay it delicately on its side on the wooden cutting board.