A Girl Like You (2 page)

“Nothing, I guess, honey. That’s a good way to look at it.”

In her early motherhood Tamura had radiated a maternal glow that Aaron found disturbing. He didn’t want her spreading like those wives in Angelina, getting all round and shapeless like half-filled cotton sacks, getting satisfied.

A second-generation Japanese-American, Tamura is pretty in a picture-perfect sort of way, fine skin, eyes like little drops of molasses, lips like the crimson bows that you sometimes see on Christmas trees. There’s something of a girl about her, a fragile narrowness that brings out a fierceness in him, the need to protect her. He would kill for her if he had to.

He thinks his wife the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, but Satomi as she grows is a girl whose reality is not clouded by love. She thinks her mother’s face a little too round to grant her true beauty, her style too old-fashioned. She feels mean for thinking it, for, after all, isn’t love supposed to be blind? Shouldn’t every daughter think her mother beautiful?

Guilt sneaks into her dreams, messing her up, so that she questions whether she is normal, whether she loves her mother at all. But she can’t help agreeing with Lily that beauty is blond.

“Can’t get away from it,” Lily declares. “Who would you rather be, Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford? See, no contest.”

Satomi, smoothing her own dark hair, thinks that Lily is right as usual, nothing beats gold hair, nothing in the world.

In the steaming nights, marooned on the island of her sweat-drenched sheets, she has plenty of time to muse on such things. She longs to read the storybooks that her teacher Mr. Beck loans her,
Little Women
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
Tom Sawyer.

“Good American literature,” he says. “Can’t go wrong with that.”

Mr. Beck doesn’t lend his books to just anybody, you have to be special, someone who is going places.

But reading in the dim glow of her bulb attracts the moths, the big brown kind that her mother says chew up cotton by the pound, so that the linen has to be rinsed in camphor, a hand-blistering chore that her father has made hers.

She hates the thick-bodied things fluttering around her room, the sickening sound of their powdery wings blistering on the bulb.

“Mama, come,” she had called as a child, “come get them.” And Tamura had come flying, catching them in her cupped hands, launching them through the open window, laughing her sweet laugh.

Tamura had been her world then, her beauty never in question. When had it changed? When had she begun to flush with shame at her mother’s black eyes, her own shrinking heart?

She isn’t a child anymore, though, can’t call on her mother for every little thing. In the heat, as darkness falls, a longing for those few minutes before dawn when the light precedes the sun, precious minutes that have a little coolness in them, brings on a miserable sense of waiting.

“Stop fussing about the heat girl,” Aaron says. “What difference does it make to you? It’s me that’s got to find the money for water. In any case, it stands to reason the rain can’t hold off for much longer. I can smell it coming, any day now. Yeah, I can smell it.”

Aaron is pretty much on the ball when it comes to the weather. He says his nose as much as his eyes tells him what’s around the corner; it’s the farmer’s gift. And it’s true that there is the faintest smell of brimstone on the air, but it has been coming and going for days now, signifying nothing, it seems to her. Her father’s just wishful-thinking, the mean streak in him anticipating free water.

She doesn’t feel like waiting until he is proved right. She has a longing to hold her head under the water tap in their yard, to soak her hair through to the scalp, let it drip-dry over her body. She imagines her tangled thoughts rolling away with the water, imagines a silvery stream seeping through the litter of fallen pine needles at the road’s edge, leaving her cool at last. But Aaron has forbidden her to use the tap. It’s out of bounds to her until the rain comes and tops up the well.

“You can’t be trusted to be careful with it. Your mother will bring the water in, she never spills a drop.”

“Too scared to, I guess,” she had risked.

She had moved fast so that his slap caught her at the side of her head—fingers, no palm, hardly a slap at all. Still, she resented it, thought him a bully.

“If he forbids it, it’s a surefire thing you’re gonna do it,” Lily challenged.

“If he catches me I’ll get more than a slap. Don’t know if it’s worth the risk.”

“Oh, sure, the risk. Never stopped you before.”

It’s hotter than ever the night before the longed-for storm finally rides in. So hot that the drenched air muffles the fox’s bark and forces the moths to fly low. Satomi can hear them flapping against the wall by the quince bush. All the windows in the house are open, which hardly makes a difference, but Aaron, hoping to catch what little through-breeze might come, has left their bedroom door ajar.

Barefoot and halfway down the dark corridor, she catches sight of Aaron and Tamura in their bedroom. Aaron, in his work shirt and coveralls, is sitting on the edge of the bed unlacing his boots. Tamura is undressing, with her back to the door. In the shadowy passageway Satomi stands silent, staring. It seems to her that it isn’t her mother she sees in the candlelight but the girl Tamura, who until this moment has been hidden from her.

Her mother’s body, so delicate that she looks as if she might still be in her girlhood, is covered in little granules of sweat as though she has been sifted with sugar. With the red bow of her lips hidden, she looks all black and white, the cadence of her hair a dark cloud on the skin of her back, which in the candle’s yielding light appears surprisingly pale.

Satomi sees her mother’s beauty again, sees in her movements a sureness she had never noticed before. It occurs to her that the Bakers in reality are two, not three at all.

“Ah, Tamura.” Aaron’s voice is hoarse, surely too tender to be his. “Blow out the candles, would you?”

Tamura answers in Japanese, soft, all-giving words that Satomi automatically translates to,
Yes, my love.

Her mother blows out the candles and in the dark her parents are entirely lost to her. She feels like crying, but doesn’t know why. Her father, it seems, can claim the girl in Tamura at his will, peel away the layer of mother, of wife, even, and under his hands make her as burdenless as a bird. As though to confirm this, in the moment before she turns from their door she hears her father murmur, “Oh, my girl, my girl.”

Back in her room, she picks up her hairbrush and starts to count, tugging the bristles through her hair, creating knots where there had been none, until her scalp burns with the force of it. She is aiming for a hundred but knows by the time she reaches twelve that she isn’t going to make it. It hurts that there are things in life that she doesn’t have a hold on, that she is out of the loop, way out.

Damn them all, she would go to the tap, do what she wants. Passing a moth that has fluttered to the floor seeking out the cooler air, she stamps on it with her bare foot. The sticky feel of its innards on her skin is revolting. She lets out an “Aargh” of disgust. Something close to remorse stirs in her.

The run of rusty water comes warm at first, then deliciously cool. It feels good being out in the dark yard, angry enough not to care if Aaron hears and comes after her. It hurts, though, that she is nobody’s girl, that she is alone in the world.

Unable to keep from her mind the picture of her parents together in theirs, she scrubs at her skin, the skin that Lily says shines like gasoline. Lily has a cruel streak, but she never bucks the truth, you have to give her that. She kicks the tap and hears it creak.

Her parents’ room, like her own, has always seemed ordinary to
her, but this night it has become another place entirely, a shining mystical place, exclusive to them. Vivid in every detail, it’s a picture she can’t shake from her mind, her mother’s silk robe carelessly spilled around the bed, their shadows moving on the wall, the little cloud of cluster flies bombing the candle, and the dark starless sky soft beyond the open window. It’s their heated night, their hooting owl, their everything. She is overcome with childish jealousy.

Next morning, as she passes their room, she sees that the curtains are drawn against the light, the bed made, everything neat and tidy as usual, but somehow not as usual. Her mother’s silk robe, the one with pink butterflies embroidered on it, is folded now across the chair. For the first time she notices that there are dark little moths scattered here and there among the butterflies. She doesn’t like them.

With newly critical eyes, she sees the patched bedspread, the peeling paintwork, and the motes of dust like fireflies in the air. Nothing feels familiar anymore. Her world has shifted somehow, as though some small link from her senses to her brain has been broken.

“Damn—damn—damn,” she curses. “It’s too damned hot.”

At breakfast she is sullen, out of sorts. Her father has already left for the fields; she must have slept later than usual.

“Guess I’m in trouble with him again, huh?” she says sulkily.

For once Tamura doesn’t rush to Aaron’s defense. “You slept well, Satomi, that’s good. You’ve been sleeping so badly lately.”

She tries to ignore her mother’s sweet smile, but it has already caused a small fracture in her heart. Still, she isn’t ready to be placated.

“Can’t say I slept that well. Nobody’s gonna get much sleep around here until this damned weather breaks.”

“Please, Satomi, don’t curse, you know your father won’t have cursing in the house.”

Hurt by her daughter’s mood, Tamura turns from her, busying herself with making her
ocha
, the green tea that reminds her of home. She is fragile when it comes to love, has never resigned herself to the ups and downs of family life. As a child she had taken every little slight to heart, and nothing much has changed in the years since. Aaron knows it, so he is careful around her, gathering her up in her injured moments, telling her boastfully that she is safe with him.

“You take too much to heart,” he says. “Don’t let people get to you so easily.”

He can’t bear to see her hurt, wants to protect her from everything that the rotten world throws at her. She is the flower on the dung heap, the only pure thing he knows. And she has given up everything to be with him, a man she might never have met had he not one day by mistake taken her brother’s bicycle from outside her family’s grocery store in the suburbs of Honolulu.

When he returned it with the briefest of apologies, he saw Tamura in all her acquiescent beauty, lowered eyes, soft voice, and knew that he must have her.

She saw a big blue-eyed American, golden-haired and smelling sweetly of milk, and knew that he would. In an instant, Hawaii and the life she lived with her family became secondary to her need to respond to Aaron’s call.

Putting down a larger than usual portion of the morning breakfast rice in front of Satomi, Tamura smiles forgivingly.

“The storm is sure to break soon.” She touches her daughter’s shining hair, notices the dark beneath her eyes, the way she won’t look at her.

“I don’t want
asagohan
. I want an American breakfast.”

“I will make you eggs. It will only take a minute. Sometimes I feel like an American breakfast too.”

“I’m bringing Lily back after school, Mother. We’re paired up on a nature assignment,” Satomi lies, hoping to annoy.

“Oh, Satomi, that’s not a good idea. You know your father doesn’t like Lily.”

“He doesn’t like anyone.”

“Well—that’s not— Anyway, you know what I mean.”

And she did, they both knew that Aaron didn’t care to know folks. When Tamura had taken him home to meet her parents, she had despaired at his off hand manner, his lack of desire to impress. They had known that their families would disapprove, had known since childhood the divide, where they were expected to draw the line between their races. But Aaron could have tried, might have made an effort.

For Tamura’s parents, though, it hadn’t so much been a dislike of Aaron that had angered them, but of the idea of their daughter marrying out of her race, her culture. Her mother couldn’t believe that she would do such a thing, and had beaten her for even considering it.

“White boys are fine as friends, but not to marry. You are Japanese, be proud of it. If you do this we will all be lost to you. You will not be welcome in your own home. Your father will never speak to you again. Just think of it, a daughter not able to be in her father’s presence, the disgrace of it might kill you.”

Tamura did think of it. But she couldn’t believe that her papa wouldn’t come to love Aaron as she did. It hurt her beyond measure when, in the days before she left home to join Aaron, her father neither spoke to nor looked at her.

Aaron’s mother, an unforgiving woman of harsh judgments, had snarled that the shame of him marrying a Jap was something she would never be able to live down.

“They’re our cane-cutters, we don’t marry them.”

“Well, she’s sweeter than our sugar, Ma. So get used to it, we’re getting married.”

“Can’t say our family is perfect, Aaron, but none of them have ever sunk so low as to marry a Jap. Good God, boy, you’ll be speaking pidgin next.”

He saw the disgust on her face, suppressed the urge to slap her. “I reckon I’m getting the better of the deal, Ma.”

“You’ve just been taken in by a pretty face, that’s all. I’m telling you now, Aaron, that I don’t care to know any half-and-half grandchildren. The truth is I just couldn’t bring myself to touch them.”

The idea to leave Hawaii had been Aaron’s. Tamura, with her family’s back turned to her, had agreed to it; if their people wouldn’t accept them, they would give them up and set out in life as though newborn. They would let go both family and religion, his Christian, hers Buddhist, and be enough in everything for each other.

“We’ll make the same sacrifices,” he said. “That way we won’t be able to blame each other in the future. We don’t need anyone but ourselves to get along.”