Southland (12 page)
Frank stared. He’d never seen a sign like this, although he’d heard about them in the news, and from Victor’s parents, when they told stories about living in Arkansas. He’d never had to think like this, either—for his first eight years he’d lived in Little Tokyo, and then for his next seven in Angeles Mesa, where there weren’t enough people of any color to legislate such boundaries. If the beach was divided into two distinct sides, on which side did he belong? Just then, a burly whiteman passed by on the way to his car, his chest burned pink and tender. “Japs go over there,” he said helpfully, pointing toward the colored side. His wife swatted him on the forearm. “Oh, honey, no they don’t.” The couple disappeared and the three boys were left standing in uncomfortable silence. Finally, Frank took a deep breath. “Last one to the water has to walk back home,” he said. And then he took off running, to the right.
T
HE ENVELOPE that held her family papers was distinct— nine by twelve inches and lime-green—but Jackie couldn’t find it for the life of her. She’d been looking for half an hour and was getting impatient, especially since it was Saturday and she’d cut short her time in bed with Laura in order to come home and keep this date with her family. She hadn’t been in the mood to stay with her anyway—they’d been awakened by an aftershock, the third that week, and it had left them both too jittery to sleep. Finally, she found the envelope, buried beneath her journals in the back of the closet.
Leaning back against the bed, she poured the contents out onto the rug—the small article about her father being promoted to head of surgery at Cedars-Sinai; a card Lois had given her for her sixteenth birthday; a picture of her optimistic-looking parents and herself as a baby posing in front of the eternal flame at JFK’s grave. This photo always made Jackie pause for a moment—her parents had been teenagers at the time of Kennedy’s death, and had named her after the president’s wife. There was a picture, which seemed about ten years old, of Frank in a coffee shop, wearing a navy blue bowling shirt that said, “Holiday Bowl”; he was sitting next to a man who Jackie recognized but couldn’t place. There was a picture of Jackie’s father as a teenager, standing with his father in their yard in Palos Verdes, among the fog-shrouded bluffs that overlooked both city and ocean. Jackie found also a few postcards, including one from Frank, who’d written her from San Francisco about ten years before, during the only trip she’d ever known him to make. She remembered the trip clearly—he’d gone, quite suddenly, just after he finally retired, not telling anyone until after he’d made the reservation, and not taking Mary along. The postcard was a standard San Francisco shot, a streetcar pulling out of Union Square. Jackie turned it over and read the fading blue ink. “San Francisco is beautiful,” he’d written. His letters were tall and lanky, rightleaning. “I’ve been to Union Square (picture on front), Fisherman’s Wharf, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, Nihonmachi (Japanese food better in Gardena). I miss LA, though. Not enough space here, and too much fog. See you soon. Love, Grandpa.”
Jackie finished looking through the pile of family memorabilia, and felt distinctly let down. There was nothing here of value or interest. She picked up an old brown-tinged portrait of Frank, as a baby, with his parents, the only picture of her family from before the war. Her great-grandfather—she didn’t know his name—was wearing a dark suit with his tie pulled out slightly between the lapels of the coat. Her great-grandmother, who was younger, wore a simple white dress. Both of them looked oddly uncomfortable— dressed up, as if for a costume party. She saw elements of Frank in each of them. There, on his father’s face, was Frank’s slender nose, and there, on his mother’s, his generous, gentle eyes and the strong square jaw bequeathed to all the Sakais. But it was the man’s stance that Jackie recognized most clearly—it was humble, unassuming, shaped through habit and years of hard labor. Humility didn’t disguise, however, the resilience and pride beneath it.
That evening, after she’d read for a few hours and gone for a run, she and Laura drove over to Beverly Hills to have dinner with Laura’s family. Laura’s sister, Sarah, was down from Stanford Business School for the weekend, and so their mother had invited everyone over. Laura had not been looking forward to it—she always grew tense and close-mouthed around her older sister—and the evening turned out to be as difficult as she had feared. Despite the attempts on the part of Laura’s mother to draw Laura out, Sarah hijacked the conversation, telling everyone in excruciating detail about her job offers, her professors, the apartment she and her boyfriend were hoping to buy, only pausing to field a question or to stuff food into her mouth. Every time Jackie looked over at Laura, she seemed to be sinking further down into her chair.
As they drove back to Fairfax a few hours later, Jackie tried to cheer Laura up. “Hey, come on,” she said, putting a hand on Laura’s shoulder. “Listen, why don’t we go to The Palms or something? We could have a couple beers and put dinner behind us.”
Laura shook her head and fought back tears. “I want to go home, but you go on ahead.”
Jackie gave her a look. “I can’t go there without you.”
“Sure you can. Just go. I know you want a drink.”
She did. “Do you want me to come back to your place after?”
Laura shook her head. They turned the corner onto her block, and she waited until they’d straightened out before she answered. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m going to be very good company tonight.”
They pulled up in front of the house, behind Laura’s car.
“OK,” Jackie said. She kissed Laura goodnight and watched Laura disappear inside the house.
Jackie sighed. She was relieved to be rid of Laura, but also saddened—they used to be so much closer. There’d been a time when a night like this, a hard family scene, would have sent them into a frenzy of lovemaking. But those nights seemed to have occurred in a different life. Jackie started her car, sighing, and drove back to her apartment. But as she approached her building, the darkness in her windows made her unbearably lonely, and she knew she needed to be someplace that was noisy with people. She swung around the block and got back onto Fairfax. At Santa Monica Boulevard, she took a left and drove a mile to The Palms.
After showing her ID to the butch, overweight bouncer—she’d reached the age where it was a compliment to still get carded—she removed herself from the flow of people streaming in and out, and stood to the side, trying to spot someone she knew. The place was hopping that night. The two bartenders were running back and forth behind the long bar, surrounded by a flurry—which clung to them like rain clouds to a mountain—of glasses, and ice, and bottles of liquor. To the right, in front of the mirrored wall, were a half-dozen tables surrounded by women. At the end of the bar was a small tiled dance floor, full now, on a Saturday, with dancers. Jackie could not make out the individual people, but she could see the way the crowd moved as one gyrating, sexual, strobeight-spotted mass. People were laughing and greeting each other with big, theatrical hugs, and Jackie wondered if this was still the euphoria she’d seen in the month since the earthquake, the uncomplicated relief of being alive. She spotted a few familiar faces, but no one she knew well enough to approach, so she weaved her way through the crowd and up to the bar, and ordered a pint of beer.
She needed this drink; she’d needed it all night. As the bartender filled the glass, she watched with anticipation, and just as she reached out to receive the mug, she felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder.
“The drink’s on me,” announced a big, happy voice from behind her. She turned around: Rebecca.
“Hey,” Jackie said, smiling, genuinely happy to see her friend. She had to yell to be heard over the music. “How you doing?”
“Great.” Rebecca tossed a five on the bar, telling the bartender with a little smile to go ahead and keep the change. Then she turned to Jackie and gave her a different kind of smile. “What are you doing out? Don’t you know that law school students aren’t supposed to have any fun?”
“Well, I’m not having fun yet. And you’re a law school student, too.”
“Yeah, much to the law school’s horror.”
Jackie smiled. It was true that some of the faculty were less than thrilled with Rebecca Nakanishi. In the hallowed halls of the law school, where even the liberal students wore ironed pants and buttoned-down shirts, Rebecca stuck out like a drag queen at a Rotary Club meeting. She was irreverent, colorful, and disrespectful of convention, but she was brilliant—third in her class. She stood there now, one foot on the rung of a stool, waving her hair and conscious of the eyes that watched her. She wore Levi’s, loosefitting, which made you wonder at the shape of the legs inside, and a low-cut tank top, black. Jackie noticed the fluid muscles of her arms, the strength and vulnerability of her collarbone.
“I had another interview yesterday,” Rebecca shouted. “With Legal Aid, in Westlake.”
“How’d it go?”
Rebecca rolled her eyes and launched into a loud monologue of complaint. It was a bad time to be doing public interest, she said—no one in the public had any interest. And the field she wanted to go into—immigrant health—was especially tough, since no one in California seemed to give a shit about immigrants, except for thinking of better ways to keep them out. Legal Aid was doing the best they could, but they only had sure funding for two lawyers, and weren’t certain they could take on another. “So who knows?” she concluded. “Maybe I’ll just end up at a firm, like you. Maybe this isn’t the time to try and save people.”
Jackie teetered on the edge between guilt and annoyance— she always felt a bit accused, a bit defensive, about Rebecca’s commitment to public interest law, when she herself was on track for corporate riches.
Rebecca took a sip of her drink, a gin and tonic. “Speaking of saving people, where’s your Other?”
Jackie took a gulp of her beer. “Home. Alone. Depressed.”
“What a surprise. You know, I was talking to Albert Stevens the other day and he told me that your last two girlfriends at Berkeley were just like Laura. What’s the deal with you, anyway? You’re like a reverse missionary. Rescuing the lost white children.”
Jackie smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, somebody’s got to.”
“So what’s the occasion for her sadness today? She break a fingernail?”
“Shut up. No. We went over to her mom’s place for dinner, and her big bad older sister was there.”
“Her mom’s cool with you though, right?”
“Very cool.”
“Good. Maybe
she
could tell your parents about your deviant sexual practices.”
“Oh, be quiet.”
“Well,
somebody’s
got to.” Rebecca grinned.
Jackie shook her head. “Be fair. It isn’t that simple. It’s not just that I don’t want to tell them I’m gay. My parents don’t want to talk about
anything
.” It was true. Jackie’s parents lived with the luxury of an innocence that Jackie didn’t totally believe in. She’d taken Laura home or out to family dinners, and her parents had accepted Laura’s presence without question. Jackie wasn’t sure whether this acceptance meant her parents knew what Laura was to her and were all right with it—like Lois; Lois always asked after Laura, and invited her to things—or that they simply had no idea. When she was in high school, they’d remarked sometimes on the intensity of particular friendships, but after a certain point, the remarks and questions had stopped. Laura didn’t understand why Jackie didn’t just tell her parents, since everybody,
everybody
(including them, she said) knew. And Jackie couldn’t explain to her that she didn’t tell her parents about her sexuality for the same reason they never asked her: If she told them, it would be out there, and then they would have to talk. And considering how poorly they all did discussing
anything
of substance, she couldn’t imagine how her parents would deal with
this
. “I mean, come on,” she said, half-pleading. “
You
know how it is with a Japanese family.”
Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so now you’re Japanese?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Rebecca replied. “Anyway, Laura. Does she know you came to this lesbian lair without her?”
But Jackie was still stuck on her friend’s last comment, and couldn’t answer right away. She didn’t really know what Rebecca was referring to, but she suspected that it had to do with Laura, and with the place where she grew up, and with the fact that, except for Rebecca herself, Jackie didn’t really have Asian friends. “Yeah,” Jackie said, finally. “She trusts me. She knows I won’t pick anyone up.”
Rebecca laughed. “Yeah, you’re kind of boring that way.”
Jackie raised her eyebrows. “Look who’s talking. When’s the last time
you
took anyone home?”
“Touché. I’ve been celibate for so long I can’t even find my own twat anymore. Not that I’ve ever been into the bar scene.” She looked troubled for a moment, and Jackie leaned in closer.
“What?”
“Well, I did go out on a few dates a while back, with this med school student from Hawaii.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl. And I mean,
girl
. Eyebrow waxing and manicures and shit.”
“So what happened?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She vanished. Stopped calling. Presto. Gone.”
“Wow,” said Jackie, standing up straight again. “You mean there’s actually someone who doesn’t want to sleep with you?”
Rebecca looked at her dismissively. “What are you talking about? There’s plenty of people who don’t want to sleep with me. Heather doesn’t,” she said, indicating a woman behind them who they both vaguely knew. She turned back to Jackie. “
You
don’t.”
She looked at Jackie and smiled, and Jackie looked away. She
didn’t
want to sleep with Rebecca—she wasn’t really attracted to her—but there was something between them, a challenge or a question. She was suddenly even more glad that Laura hadn’t come along—Laura didn’t like Rebecca and was threatened by her. Jackie assured her that there was no reason to be—she’d never go for Rebecca, girlfriend or not, despite, or maybe because of (as Laura said) “the things they had in common.” It wasn’t that she didn’t find her friend attractive or appealing. But Rebecca was half-Japanese, and despite her green almond-shaped eyes and wavy brown hair, she looked Asian enough to turn Jackie off; to make Jackie think of her as a mirror she didn’t want to look into. Kissing Rebecca would be like kissing a sister, if she had one—unerotic, strange, slightly creepy. But it was more than that. Rebecca, with her brains, her looks, and above all, her panache, made Jackie feel stiff and boring in comparison. Jackie wasn’t used to feeling inadequate, and it occurred to her, suddenly, that part of what she got out of being with Laura was that she felt so strong and able in contrast.
