Kira-Kira (5 page)

The day before I started first grade, Lynn sat me down for a talk. She gave me talks only when something very, very serious was happening. She always told me the truth and didn’t treat me like a baby. It was she and not my parents who’d first told me we were leaving Iowa.

We sat cross-legged on the floor in our room and held hands and closed eyes while she chanted, “Mind meld, mind meld, mind meld.” That was our friendship chant.

She gazed at me solemnly. “No matter what happens, someday when we’re each married, we’ll own houses down the block from each other. We’ll live by the sea in California.”

That sounded okay with me. “If y’all are going to live by the sea, I will too,” I said. I had never seen the California sea, but I imagined it was very pretty. She leaned forward then, and I knew she was going to get to the point of this talk.

“Have you noticed that sometimes people
won’t say hello to Mom when we’re out shopping?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, some of the kids at school may not say hello to you, either.”

“You mean because they don’t know me?”

“No, I mean because they don’t want to know you.”

“Why wouldn’t they want to know me?” Who wouldn’t want to know me? This was a new idea for me. Our father had always thought we were quite amazing, and Lynn, of course, had always thought I was perfect, so I thought of myself as rather amazing and maybe even perfect.

“Because, there’s only thirty-one Japanese people in the whole town, and there’s more than four thousand people in the town, and four thousand divided by thirty-one is . . . a lot more of them than of us. Do you understand?”

“No.”

Lynn’s face darkened. That was kind of unusual. “Haven’t you noticed that Mom and Dad’s only friends are Japanese?”

“I guess so.”

“That’s because the rest of the people are ignoring them. They think we’re like doormats—or ants or something!” Now she was really angry.

“Ants?”

She suddenly reached out and hugged me to her. “You tell me if anybody treats you like that, and I’ll take care of it!”

“Okay.” Sometimes Lynn didn’t seem to make sense. That was because I was so young and she was such a genius.

Then she kissed my face and said, “You’re the most wonderful girl in the world!”

Right then my mother came in with scissors to chop off my long straight hair. This was a ritual all the local Japanese mothers performed the day before they sent their daughters off to school for the first time. My mother cut my hair to my chin and made me sleep in pin curls all night. This was okay with me because Lynn wore curls during the school year, and so I knew it was what big girls did. But when I woke up and took out the bobby pins, I was too shocked even to cry or scream
or stomp around the house. I looked like a feather duster! After the shock wore off, I was ready to cry and scream and stomp. “I’m not going to school!” I screamed. “I’m not!” I stared in the mirror, closed my eyes, and stared again. I stomped one foot and then the other. Lynn gaped at me. She looked kind of half amused and kind of half horrified.

My mother “fixed” my hair by combing it. She said I looked like Ava Gardner, who Lynn said was a beautiful famous actress with about seventy thousand boyfriends. If she was so famous, why had I never heard of her? Still, I liked the idea of looking like a movie star. I calmed down a bit. My father said, “You look like . . . you look like . . . well, you look awfully cute!” It was the middle of the night, because that’s when my parents went to work. They were both running a little late so that they could spend time with me on my first day of school.

My mother put me in a yellow chiffon party dress. I liked the dress. And I was starting to like my hair. As a matter of fact, I started to think I looked quite ravishing. After my
parents went to work, I just sat there and wouldn’t move in case my hair got mussed. I wouldn’t even let Lynn try to comb my hair because it was already perfect. When Mrs. Kanagawa came over to check on us, she oohed and aahed over how cute I looked.

I felt like an empress on the way to school. I wasn’t even nervous as we walked on the shoulder of the road to school. Lynn was just wearing a jumper, but her hair was curled like mine. She stopped when we stood across the street from the school.

“That’s it?” I said. The school wasn’t any bigger than our little apartment building.

“That’s it,” she said.

I was a little disappointed. I didn’t understand what all the commotion had been about or why I was wearing my best dress.

When we walked into the schoolyard, I saw that all the other girls were dressed more like Lynn, in jumpers or plain skirts with white blouses. Lynn walked me to my class line, where I stood on the number—Classroom #100—by myself. All around me girls were playing and talking. They all wore curls, but
no one’s hair was as curly as mine. Finally, the bell rang, and about a dozen kids lined up behind me.

Somebody tapped me on my shoulder, and when I turned around, the girl right in back of me said, “Are you Chinese or Japanese?”

“Japanese,” I said.

Another girl called out, “What’s your native name?”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but I said, “Natsuko.” That was my middle name. It means “summer”—when I was born. My sister’s middle name was Akiko, which means “autumn”—when she was born.

Then a girl said to me, “What happened to your hair?”

I could tell she wasn’t insulting me; she was just curious. I felt my face grow hot. I didn’t answer.

Then the teacher came to walk us into class. She smiled at my dress and said, “Going to a party?” I would have gone home right then, but I wasn’t sure I could find the way without Lynn.

When class opened, the teacher said
everyone could sit where they wanted, just for today. All the girls screamed and giggled and rushed this way and that around me. Then they all sat down. At recess I stood in the middle of the schoolyard in my party dress. Once, two girls from my class walked by not far from me, and I called out, “School sure is boring, isn’t it?” but they ignored me. Lynn came out to stand with me. She said she’d stayed inside a few minutes after the bell because her teacher wanted to tell her what a good girl she was.

Later that afternoon, when I didn’t know an answer, my teacher looked disappointed and said, “I’ve heard your sister is very smart.” I didn’t hold this against Lynn, though. I was proud of her.

Shortly before I’d started first grade, my mother had started to gain a lot of weight. She peed a lot, she threw up a lot, and she drank a lot of water. She ate weird things, like spoonful after spoonful of barbecue sauce. We had to keep several jars of barbecue sauce in the cabinet. My sister sat me down, and after our
mind meld she told me that we were going to have a baby brother.

My mother gave birth to Samson Ichiro Takeshima while I was in first grade. His middle name means “first son.” All the nurses at the hospital took turns coming to see him when he was born—they had never seen a Japanese baby before. Sam was covered with bruiselike marks on his backside, the way Japanese babies sometimes are. Nobody had hit him, that’s just the way their bodies are. It was funny how so many people ignored my mother, but they were all fascinated by this little Japanese baby. Then, when he grew up, they would probably ignore him and treat him like an ant! I liked to watch the nurses leaning in toward the glass, cooing over little Samson. I was proud of him because I thought he was the cutest baby in the world.

Not long after my mother brought him home from the hospital, she returned to work at the factory. She was assigned a late shift at that time and never finished working until mid-evening. Mrs. Kanagawa took care of Sam during the day while Lynn and I were at summer
school. Lynn wanted to go to summer school so one day she could graduate high school early. I had to go to summer school because my parents made me. After school we would run feverishly home to take care of our new brother.

At night Lynn, Sam, and I would lie outside in the empty street and watch the stars. Sam would lie in the middle as Lynn and I chanted,
“Kira-kira, kira-kira.”

One hot night our father was staying overnight at the hatchery, which he did sometimes to save driving time and get more sleep. Our mother was already in bed. We snuck outside in our pajamas and lay in the middle of the street. I liked wearing my pajamas outside. Someday when I was a grown-up lazy person, I would wear my pajamas whenever I wanted. I liked to ask Lynn questions, because she knew so many answers.

I said, “What would it feel like if all the stars were made of bits of ice and they fell from the sky and landed on us?”

And Lynn said it would feel nice. How did she know that? Because she knew everything!

I asked her, “What would happen if all the tea in China suddenly fell from the sky and landed on us?”

She said that would feel nice too.

Finally, we got sleepy and went inside. Our bedroom now contained two beds and a crib. When Lynn needed to study, she used the kitchen table. Some nights I liked to put Sam on my little bed so he could sleep with me instead of alone. I did not want the
oni
—ogres who I knew guarded the gates of hell—to take my brother in the night. I hugged him to me all night. When he was one year old, I remembered something: At some point since he had been born, I had lost Bera-Bera and never even noticed.

chapter 5

S
AMMY WAS THE
calmest baby in the world. He hardly ever cried. Lynn took care of me, and I took care of Sammy. And we all took care of one another. It’s hard to believe that for the next couple of years nothing happened. It was wonderful. We spent all our spare time with one another. In my sister’s diary entries from those years she chronicled what days Sammy learned how to walk and talk, what our homework assignments were every night, what time our parents got home from work, and any other details she could think of. She had the
neatest handwriting in the world. Sometimes I would watch her write in her diary, and I was amazed at how perfect her writing was.

Occasionally, my uncle brought us on camping trips. Lynn said that his camping trips were the most fun thing she ever did. I agreed with her about that. She asked me, “Do you agree with me all the time just because I say so or because you really, truly agree with me?” I didn’t see the difference between the two things, so I just said I didn’t know.

Sometimes, in case she became a famous writer, Lynn practiced writing little stories in her diary:

Once upon a time a funny witch cast a spell on all the world’s creatures. Suddenly, all the animals that used to be able to fly could only walk and all the animals that used to walk could now fly. So you saw horses soaring through the sky and preening on rooftops; you saw birds by the thousands running through the streets and along highways.
And the fish, don’t even mention the fish! The fish learned to drive and the humans lived in the sea. The End.

I think the whole reason she wrote that story was that she loved the idea of living in the sea. That was one thing that never varied about Lynn: her love of the sea. Living by the sea in California was what she looked forward to second most in life, after going to college. Owning our own home was third for her, and first for our mother.

Every week that passed was nearly the same. School was boring and homework was boring. Playing with my brother and sister was fun. That’s the way the days went, with no surprises.

Everything started to change the winter I was ten and a half. One unusually warm day in January all the kids from the apartments were playing dodgeball after school. Lynn was in charge, as always. She said, “Katie, you stand there. Toshi, you stand here.” And so on. She chose a little boy to stand in the middle.

The boy flung the ball at Lynn. That wasn’t very smart, because Lynn was quick. But the ball flew up and hit her chest. She staggered back. Everyone except me laughed. My sister got almost cross-eyed, and everybody laughed more. I didn’t laugh because I knew Lynnie better than anyone.

“Lee-uhn!” I said. I ran over to her.

She swayed a bit but said, “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. It seemed swirly for a second.”