“And how were things after? Weird?”
Alex stares down at his hands. “We … actually got closer. I don’t know, maybe it showed we could be completely honest with each other?” He shrugs. “Something like that.”
Alex is half expecting Frank to rib him again. But when he looks up, Frank is gazing at him with a strange expression. “In some ways I really envy you,” Frank says.
“You envy … me?”
“Yeah. To have a friend that close.”
“You’ve got friends all around! You’re Mr. Popular!”
He looks down to the floor. “Yeah. But no one really that…” He shakes his head. “Nah, never mind.” He picks up his pillow, plumps it into shape. “But do me a favor, okay, Alex? Maybe you should, like, go o
ut on a date once in a while. Take a gal out to the Bowlmoor. Or the drive-in some Saturday night. Take someone. Just so, you know…”
“Just so what?”
“Nothing.” He lies down, settling under the blanket. He looks at Alex, head on pillow. “Just so you stay grounded. So you stay real. So you don’t get too lost in fantasyland.” He turns to the wall, and a minute later is asleep.
Alex stays at his desk a while longer. Not to finish writing his letter. Instead, after Frank starts snoring, he opens up the drawer and slips out a letter he’s reread countless times. He unfolds its page with all the care of a museum archivist over an artifact. The pages were once lightly perfumed, and Alex likes to imagine he can even now detect a lingering whiff. He turns to the paragraph where Charlie had called him an idiot. He’s read this paragraph countless times; not because he particularly enjoys being called an idiot, but because of what follows.
… you’re an idiot, Alex. Because you don’t say these kinds of affections now. Not at 14 years old, not when we don’t have a chance of seeing each other for many years. No: you say it when you are 18 or 19, when you are old enough to travel to Paris and see me. When you are old enough to—maybe as a university student!—live here. That is when you say, “I love you.” You are an idiot!
She never brought the topic up again, thankfully. But even now her words—every curlicue and loop of each character indelibly etched into his mind—bring a small smile to his face, and make his heart, even after almost three years, beat a little faster.
5
DECEMBER 11, 1941
Alex wakes before the crack of dawn. Picks his head off folded arms, his neck creaking. A pool of drool splotches his letter, next to a blot of ink where his pen bled. It’s his morning to do chores, and with a groan he pushes off the desk.
He walks down to the kitchen, fills a glass with water. A voice suddenly whispers in Japanese, “Your turn for chores?”
“Father?” He almost drops the glass. “I didn’t see you.” He walks over to the kitchen table, pulls out a chair. Sleep lines crease Father’s face. He’s been down here all night. Nobody is sleeping well these days.
An almost-empty bottle of sake sits on the table. Beneath the faint aroma of alcohol, Alex smells damp soil and strawberry wafting from Father’s clothes, from the pores of his leathery, prematurely withered skin. Spread out before him, letters and postcards and aerograms from Japan lie scattered around the bottle. When Father drinks—which isn’t often—he becomes sentimental. He’ll bring out old letters and talk everyone’s ears off. This is how Alex has learned of Father’s past: through the vapor of sake, beer, whisky, the spillage of slurred words.
It’s in those moments, looking into Father’s drunken eyes (the only time he can gaze directly into them), that Alex sees the restlessness rooted deep into the bones of every immigrant. That spirit of adventure that made Father gaze across the seas and wonder about a land called A-me-ri-ka. When the economy in Japan and especially his prefecture collapsed, he left his parents and two older brothers, and set sail. And never once looked back.
When Father speaks of his first years in America he speaks of the adventure lived. He never mentions the hardships endured, or the racism faced. He speaks only nostalgically and even gloriously of his days working at the Port Blakely Mill—a sawmill on Bainbridge Island that had taken to hiring immigrant Japanese after its usual supply of Chinese laborers was cut off by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The work was hard but the pay at least steady. And the community of Issei was tight-knit, living together in a segregated settlement of barracks built along a steep hill. Yama, they called it. “Mountain.”
When the Port Blakely Mill folded, the Issei looked elsewhere for work, and they didn’t have to look far. For years, they’d noted the soil of Bainbridge Island, how it seemed suitable for fruit agriculture. And there was ample land on this sparsely populated island that was occupied only seasonally by wealthy Seattle families in summer homes. The Issei community spread themselves across the island, and with no-nonsense grit, cleared land, removed tree stumps using horses, and blasted the ground with dynamite to clear it of glacially deposited rocks.
In that way they went from millworkers to strawberry farmers; in that way they went from immigrants to settlers and then neighbors. Their roots dug deeper into this American land with each new strawberry harvest, and deeper yet with each new birth of what never stopped being miraculous to them, their American child.
“Before your grandma died,” Father says now, “she would write twice a year. On my birthday and on the date I left Japan.” He runs his fingertips over yellowing envelopes. “I wish she could have met you and Daisuke. She’d have been so proud.”
So unexpected, this tenderness. Father could be like that, spring on you a sudden softness. He was usually an uncomplicated man of authority, and this authority was absolute and total. Over his wife. His boys. Over the chickens whose necks he wrung and slashed, over the land he tilled and browbeat into submission. Even seemingly over the weather itself by sheer force of his indomitable immigrant will.
But one day when Alex was seven, perhaps eight, something happened after which he never saw Father quite the same way. They’d gone downtown, the two of them, to buy supplies. They were in a hardware store, just leaving, when Alex went to the restroom. When he came out, he saw through the storefront windows Father waiting outside on the street, hands clasped behind his back.
Then.
A school bus—yellow, massive—screeched to a halt. Its appearance was like a large background stage prop sliding behind Father. The bus was packed with a visiting junior-high-school baseball team.
Father turned his back to the bus, faced the storefront window. For a second his eyes seemed to meet Alex’s; but then they slid away. The storefront glass was a mirror in the bright sunlight.
The students in the bus were staring outside, bored and hot. Damp hair stuck to their sweaty faces.
The traffic light was still red.
One of the players spotted Father. His lips twisted into a sneer. He mouthed something, thumped the bus window.
Don’t, Father, don’t turn around—
Father turned around. Like a stupid, obedient dog. His neck twisted awkwardly as he gazed upward. He seemed so impossibly small and tiny. So ridiculously out of place.
The teenage boy had a rash of angry zits, and he shouted something. He was excited now. Another boy joined him at the window. They were all angles and bones, these boys. They pointed at Father, the tips of their fingers turning white against the glass.
At the next window, another boy, then another, gawked at Father.
Father gazed back at them, his neck contorted.
Turn around, Father, stop staring back—
The traffic light was still red.
One of the boys pulled the corners of his eyes down into a slant. Puckered his lips, buckteething the upper row. Alex couldn’t hear the boy’s laughter, but the sight of those white teeth and deliriously happy faces seemed to possess its own horrific sound.
Father finally turned around.
They pounded the windows louder, rattling them. A boy pulled down a window. Now the gales of laughter rolled out of the bus like a hot tongue. From even inside the store, Alex could hear the meanness in them.
And all the while, Father did nothing. Stared expressionlessly down the street, his back to the yelling kids, the pulled eyes, the intoned accents.
For the first time in his life, what Alex felt toward Father wasn’t fear. It was shame.
A police officer came walking around the corner, drawn by the hooligan sounds. He was about to yell at the kids when he saw Father. His stance changed. Now he turned to Father. With a flap of his hand, he waved Father along. Like Father was the offending one.
And he did. He moved along. With a nod, a nervous smile.
Everything changed that day. With that courteous nod, that accommodating smile, a bubble burst in Alex’s mind. He never saw Father the
same way again. Father went from being a leader in the Japanese community, a towering being of complete authority—almost a deity—to what he was. An immigrant. A foreigner. A mocked, clueless, misplaced immigrant, put in his place by white boys, kowtowing to all.
When Alex exited the store, the bus was already gone. Father was standing halfway down the other street. Alex went to him, not knowing what to say, if anything at all. Father’s expression was the same as usual. Stoic and unreadable. Without saying a word, they walked to the truck parked a few blocks away. Got in. Drove down the street, out of town.
They didn’t talk on the ride home, not about the bus incident, not about anything at all. It was like it never happened. It was a rock cast into a flat lake; and when the ripples faded it was as if nothing had ever disturbed the water. But the rock was still there, buried deep and hidden, like a lump in the throat.
So strange, Alex had thought, that you could love someone so much, yet also be so ashamed of that same person.
He looks at Father now sitting at the table. At home, away from the outside world where he is regarded a dithering fool, he is the accepted anchor of this family, giving stability and protection. He fills his sake cup one last time, tosses it down, his eyes watery.
“Well, since I’m up anyway,” he says, “might as well get an early start.” He places the envelopes and aerograms and postcards carefully back into the shoebox. “Maybe you should get an early start on your chores, too.”
Alex nods. Outside, a gout of purple-pink is breaking the horizon; in a few minutes, the dawn sun will poke shyly but decisively through.
Father rubs his face with his coarse palms. “I know it’s hard work. I know it’s no fun. So study hard, Koji-kun. Get into a good college, then dental school, right? You’ve got the brains, certainly. Then you won’t ever have to clean out chicken poop. You can leave this farm and live in the big city. A nice house in the suburbs of Seattle. Come by on weekends to visit us.” He nods at Alex. “Right, Koji-kun?”
“Yes, Father.” He lowers his eyes quickly. Truth is, he doesn’t want to be a dentist. But what he really wants to do—what he dreams about, spends endless hours fantasizing about—that’ll break Father’s heart.