The turtle house, p.16
The Turtle House, page 16
“Have you ever imagined such a thing?” Mineko said.
“So much change in just a few short years. Do you remember how destroyed it all was?”
Mineko had traveled to Tokyo on Fumiko’s request two months after Japan accepted defeat, the trip long and tedious because train lines had been melted by fire and twisted into a Western-style ringlet. And it was unseasonably cold for fall. She had gone from walking to a buggy to the back of a truck. She had half expected a mule over the next hill, but she was already there, Tokyo, what was left of it and what was being built back. What year was this again? Oh, years, they all get muddled together in chaos. November of 1945. Americans were everywhere in Tokyo, and Mineko had gone from neighborhood to neighborhood inquiring about Fumiko. A cousin of a cousin of a cousin had pointed her to Utsukushī House, slightly south of Tokyo.
A Recreation and Amusement Association house. A brothel.
There was a line of occupation troops: light blue, navy blue, olive drab.
It had been only a few months. If war life was as quick as a pulse, after-war life was a pulse racing. This was Fumiko’s job. This was the opportunity of which had been spoken.
Mineko reached out to touch Fumiko’s arm.
“We’re leaving. At least, I think we’re leaving. James got a letter. By early summer.”
“Leaving? For where?” Fumiko looked at Mineko with wide eyes.
“Texas. He’s been speaking more of it lately to his friends. Then the letter arrived. I see now what has been happening.”
“And this is allowed? The American government will let you in? And Japan will let you go?”
“The US has said yes to others in our same position. And Japan doesn’t care—one less mouth to feed. James gets what he wants. I pity the government that tries to stop him.”
“And he wants you.”
“Fumiko, he wants his home.” Mineko looked quickly for Mae and, finding her picking tiny fall wildflowers, she took a deep breath and faced Fumiko. “And before you say anything, it is not your fault.”
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness. When I got to Tokyo, I wandered and was hungry and cold.”
“I know, you’ve told me this before.”
“A woman came to me and said she knew of government jobs. She seemed like a good woman. And there was a trolley leaving soon. All I needed was to give my name to the driver and he’d give me a piece of paper and there would be food and a clean room and work. Some of the girls were from different places. But many were Japanese, too.”
“Fumi—”
But Fumi held her hand up for Mineko to stop. Her eyes bored into Mineko’s.
“They needed more girls. Sometimes thirty men a day. They asked us, ‘Who do you know from your hometowns?’ They said that they would give us extra money and extra food if we could get more girls. And mostly, they said with more girls there would be less men for each of us each day. I met a boy from outside Osaka, he knew Kadoma, he had a friend there, they were meeting up somehow, I told him to get word to you, to tell you I’d been located, but not the location. I made him promise.”
Fumiko put a hand on Mineko’s arm.
Mineko could suddenly feel Mae’s breath on her elbow. Mineko looked down at her daughter.
“They have ducks and turtles in the little pond. There’s a woman selling crumbs. Do you have a coin? They look like they’re hungry.”
Mineko dug through her little bag and produced money and handed it, wordlessly. She felt like her insides had been excavated.
“You sent for me because they asked you to.”
“I knew you would come. I didn’t think they’d get to you, I thought . . . I thought you wouldn’t work for them. And that you’d come up with a way to help me leave.”
Mineko hadn’t become a comfort woman. Instead, those in charge, nameless, faceless men and women—all Japanese, all government-paid—had looked at her plainness, her muscular body, stocky even through hunger, and made her the downstairs girl. The girl who served drinks to those waiting. She would deliver little slips of paper with English numbers on them, brightly colored cuts of coral and mint, to different men, as prescribed by the oldest matron in charge, a sour-faced woman, and the men would take the slips to the corresponding rooms.
She was the deliverer of sweat and thrusting, of alcohol breath and animal-like noises. Mineko hated herself for this. She hated her weakness when shown the bags of rice she could buy, when she had told them no, my parents are far away in Kadoma, how would a bag of rice from the black market here help them there? There was no mail system, all had been destroyed or stopped by the Americans. Then they explained the couriers. Couriers were cheap, they were mostly trustworthy, they would deliver whatever she wanted to send. Yes, work for them, a girl from a good area with a good head for numbers, she could collect the Americans’ money, count it out, deliver it to the matron. She could help run the downstairs. It was good, after all, this work. Did she know how unsafe every woman and girl child would be in the country if these occupiers were allowed to just run like wild dogs?
Her sister sent word from Kadoma. Her father was sick. Stomach in pain all the time. Sent home from his job when the Americans took over the train system. Could barely move from his bed to outhouse. He was lonely in his room, but what could be done? Please send medicines. Bismuth subsalicylate. Can you find it? The food she sent and the money, it helped the family. They didn’t know how she got it, how she had managed. I ride my bike in the black market, she lied. Of course she did, she knew her mother would say, that unusual daughter of hers, finally of some use.
Mineko and Fumiko watched as Mae paid for the crumbs and started to toss them into the murky pond. It was a new park, but had not been completed yet and wouldn’t be until the housing was done. Weeds sprouted here and there, and the land had the distinct feeling that it was haunted by whatever had stood before in this spot. The little pagoda, which was a brilliant blue, was already chipped and soot-covered from nearby construction.
“Your father?”
“Alive,” Mineko said. “And Mother is well. Hisako is still single. It’s funny, the fire changed us both, we’re closer now. But the man she was promised to passed after returning home finally.”
She heard Fumiko murmur with surprise, Mineko’s eyes still trained on Mae.
“He killed himself,” Mineko said.
Fumiko grasped her wrist and squeezed it.
“Many have,” she said.
Mineko let her touch her, she didn’t shake her loose, although this emotion, this display was too much for her. But what did she expect? She had come to say goodbye, left the base with nothing but a longing for home and the only bit of home left was Fumiko. Home can disappoint, she thought.
“It has been hard for everyone. I had a choice to leave, but I felt duty to my family, so I stayed at Utsukushī until it was closed. I stayed because I had nothing waiting for me elsewhere.” Mineko waved Mae back to her when the girl glanced up. “Now I have Mae, I have a baby to come. They are my family.”
“You must wish,” Fumiko began, but Mae was upon them. The sun was dipping lower. Mae’s nose was the tiniest bit pink from the coolness that was settling into the shade where she had been.
“No. I do not wish anything,” Mineko said. She said it quietly, as if Mae weren’t listening, but she knew the little girl was, she was always listening. It was hard to hold the girl at arm’s length, but she did so quite well and would try to do so with this next child, too. Mineko felt as if she were a gaping hole in the ground and that if they were to get too close, they would tumble in.
“America will be good. My children—they are fine on base with the other hāfu, but in Tokyo, it is not so. They will not have a life here off the base. There will be more opportunities in Texas, surely.”
Mae looked at her mother with pleading eyes. Mineko instantly knew that Mae would remember, always, that she heard about their move across the ocean in a conversation. That she had heard this life-altering information after feeding turtles in a dirty park.
Chapter 15
Dennis, Texas
March 30, 1999
Waking up in Autumn Leaves is like waking up in a business-class hotel. There’s the sound of trays and the soft-soled assistants delivering medicines; there’s a whir of noises that I can only imagine are showers and toilets, coffee makers with automatic timers, and somewhere, the gentle ding and rumble of the elevator.
The sun is coming through the curtains because we forgot to close the blackout portion last night. My grandmother’s glasses are on her stomach, moving up and down with each snore, and we are wearing what we wore yesterday. We have gone through an entire package of sandwich cookies, and I feel the tiny crumbs on the bedspread as I sit up. All around us is graph paper. I made a late run to the office supply store, getting there right before they closed for the night and before the sky opened up, dumping water troughs of rain, and bought whatever I felt was needed for the project at hand.
It was what she had wanted all along, but had never said it in the way we both understood. A house. Just for her retirement. But built to her specifications.
Grandminnie sits up with a groan and puts on her glasses. She looks at me blankly, brushes crumbs off my chest, and mutters that we are both slobs. But then she smiles, remembering our work, our plans from the night before.
On a twenty-four-inch-by-thirty-six-inch piece of graph paper is the turtle house, as it is in my grandmother’s memory and the one blurry photo she has. She paced out how big the main rooms were last night. We had to go out into the long hallway at midnight, and she closed her eyes and walked from the genkan to the back wall. How many feet wide? How tall were the ceilings? We guessed, then did math. Each graph paper square is a foot, each foot a part of the past. She helped me sketch the front from her memory, the sides, the back of the house that faced the river. She dictated as I drew the grounds, the river below, the road leading to the bamboo forest. Pages and pages of paper are all over Grandminnie’s studio apartment.
Then, at two in the morning, with pea-sized hail hitting the balconette window, we shrank the turtle house. One story became two, the rooms smaller. Again, we paced and, using the proportion method, we made it the right size for one woman, one cat, and an occasional overnight guest. We placed it on Cope land, near the creek, using our own memory-based aerial map.
Off and on, all night, I recorded her memories of the house, of the colors of the tiles and the thickness of the tatami. The types of flowers in the garden and the types of stones that paved the walkway. We used up two mini-cassettes last night. I label them with the date, and I store them in a purple Crown Royal velvet bag in my backpack, all in order from day to day, story to story.
“We’re off by feet, you know,” I say, pointing at the final incarnation of the house plans. “I need a computer with AutoCAD to really get this figured out.”
My grandmother is up, making coffee. She finds pushpins in a shoebox of desk stuff and tacks the old turtle house and the new turtle house on the wall above the television set.
“Then find one.”
“Not that easy.”
“Your old job?”
“Impossible,” I say, taking a cup of coffee from her.
“You know, this house will be very expensive to build. Many things will have to be shipped from Japan. A lot of money. How will I make all that money?”
“You have retirement funds. And I can pitch in.”
My grandmother laughs and points her finger at me, a little cannon.
“Only if you go be an architect again. Bow money isn’t going to help much.”
“I’m not a real architect.”
“Where is your—” Grandminnie balls her hands into fists and holds them out like a boxer. “You know the words! Your tough stuff!”
I think she’s talking about confidence. Where was my tough stuff? I don’t think I ever had a wealth of it. And my tough stuff took a hit that fourth year. That studio was led by a snarky professor who overcompensated for inexperience by talking a lot and offering very few answers. Even kind and eager Antares was peeved by the end of the first month of classes. Bradley was livid. Rochelle was murderous. But they all kept working on their steel-and-concrete masterpieces.
I, however, was stumped, spending far too much time researching. My fake client was a multinational oil and gas company, something I knew next to nothing about. I decided to research the history of oil and gas headquarters throughout the Southwest. Then the companies themselves. Then I began studying petroleum, the science of its creation. I told myself daily that it was time to turn my attention to my design, that I was, again, two weeks behind the rest of the group, an amount that would wreak havoc on my schedule. But I kept going back to the library, diving down rabbit holes, spending so many dimes at the copy machine that I had to go to the bank to pick up another twenty dollars’ worth of dime rolls.
“Honey, we’re gonna name this Xerox room after you if you keep this up,” the librarian joked with me.
The pressure to succeed again, to be the ideal commercial architect, kept me up nights. Staring into my mini-fridge, hungry again after staying up so late, I tried to squelch the words in my head: I just didn’t care about this corporation and their building. But it was my career to care. I settled on a piece of American cheese.
It was the prof, Mr. Snarky, who also had me shaken, calling my initial thoughts regarding my design “watered-down.”
I couldn’t move past it.
All of my insecurities melded into these words. I felt like he was describing me. I was too smart for my three-stoplight town (two if there had been a storm), but not bright enough for my major here. I was the girl who was the Almost Asian in Austin, but who still was taunted with chants of “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” when I was a kid in Curtain. I was watered-down Lia Cope. The girl who didn’t fit anywhere.
“Go talk your concept out with Darren,” Bradley suggested, all of us finally packing up our backpacks to go home well after midnight. This, sadly, was what we called an early night. “You’ve always been his favorite—he’ll help you through this.”
But I didn’t want to, because he had helped me last time and I felt like I should be able to figure this out for myself. Besides, I didn’t like being called his favorite. Rochelle told Bradley to mind his own business and Bradley responded, It’s not like she’s an Aimee or anything.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Rumor mill shit,” Rochelle said. But Bradley explained that one of Aimee’s former group mates had run into her off campus and he swore that she looked rough.
“Can’t a girl have an off day?” Rochelle had said. We were waiting in line at the snack machine, junk food glowing in front of us. Later, she had sidled up next to me. “Let’s talk,” she whispered, and we went to the fourth-floor bathroom.
“I feel like I need to say something, to someone,” she said.
“What?” I asked, curious. I was picking at my cuticles.
“So, last semester, very end, I saw Aimee and Darren in the parking garage together.”
“And—”
“She was really upset.”
Aimee had never returned to class, and it was common knowledge that she had dropped out of the program.
“Well, she had chosen to quit and I’m sure that was a hard decision for her,” I suggested.
“No, it wasn’t like that. He was backing away from her like she had the plague. They were having an argument.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. We both know that Aimee’s popular. She even slept with Bradley last semester—”
“What?”
Rochelle rolled her eyes. “It was after that Cain & Abel’s night. Not a big deal. But did you ever pick up on, I don’t know, something off with Darren?”
I felt my stomach flip. I thought of that night with Mrs. Grant.
“What does this have to do with me?”
“I don’t know. Just thought you should know.”
I am back to sketching the front elevation of the turtle house. I open up the box of fresh colored pencils and hold a blue-gray up to my eye. Considering they’re office supply quality, not fancy art store, they’re pretty smooth.
Grandminnie is slurping hot coffee, watching me.
“Cut it out. Let me color in peace.”
But she doesn’t move and, instead, bends closer.
I think of the dean and Mr. Snarky, both leaning over my shoulder during a desk crit, discussing my work later that semester. It was no longer considered watered-down; instead they said it was too feminine for a petroleum company.
I wanted to slide to the floor and worm my way to the elevator. Then Darren, who had been in the back of the pack of roving profs, told me to meet him in his office later so we could fix this.
I sigh, then blow my bangs out of my face. Grandminnie squeezes the cartilage in my ear and tells me she is going to the dining room to procure a late breakfast for us. You need your strength to get your tough stuff back, she jokes.
Chapter 16
Tachikawa Air Base, Tokyo
March 1953
In the months leading up to the move, Mineko busied herself with preparation. She sent another letter to her family, letting them know what was happening. After many years of silence, she received a letter from both her father and mother. Her father urged her to use her money, any money she had, to invest in Japanese pearls, so inexpensive now; that way, if she found herself in need, she could sell them easily in Texas and have something of her own. Her mother asked about base life and the children, then concluded with the question surely on the family’s mind: Would she continue to send money from Texas?
Out of the bit of allowance James gave her each week, Mineko had saved back a small amount, an amount that wouldn’t be missed. On the last Friday of the month, she would travel into Tokyo, away from the base postal office, and mail her parents money wrapped in a letter. She had learned that since her father’s forced retirement and illness, they had taken in a boarder. This, odd jobs for her sister, and her money kept her family safe.
