Chapter Four Violet #2
She crosses the room to pull back a faded floral bedsheet partitioning the barrack. It reveals a mother holding a baby and three children. Everyone, including the baby, pauses at our intrusion. The woman drops the sheet.
“Go ask the block manager. They’ll find somewhere else to put you.”
“You don’t need to speak to us like that.
” I’m not used to hearing anyone talk so rudely to Mama.
My temper rises. I understand if they don’t wish to move the expectant girl—she seems unwell—but the woman is downright discourteous, and Mama has been nothing but polite.
“Clearly there’s been a misunderstanding. ”
Displeasure flashes in the woman’s eyes, as bright as her fake jewels. She opens her mouth to respond but Mama interjects, saying, “It’s all right. We will ask the block manager. Have a nice day.”
Mama reaches for the door. I glare at the woman. She imperiously sashays over to a suitcase and ignores me.
Suddenly, without warning, the boy looks up and our eyes meet.
A spark of recognition lights his gaze. His body, which has been slack against the wall, stiffens.
Does he know me? But I’ve never seen him before.
I would remember because, oh my Lord, he’s attractive.
I think he’s the most handsome guy I’ve ever seen.
It’s like God strove for perfection when creating him.
Yet his handsomeness is roughened by troubled weariness.
It collects between his brows, tightens his jaw, and sits behind his eyes.
If God made him beautiful, he certainly didn’t make him happy.
His sullenness is woven into him, as though it has been part of him for ages.
My heartbeat stutters as I take him in, my scowl vanishing from my face. My deer swells with even more warmth.
Never have I wanted to draw someone so badly.
I realize we’ve been staring at each other as my pocket fills with the deer’s heat. I want us to speak. I want to know his name. I want to know every single thing about him.
“Violet!” Mama’s voice startles me. “Come.”
I pull my attention away from him to acknowledge Mama, and when it returns, his head has dropped again. An unexpected ache twists through me at the lack of his gaze. There’s nothing to do but leave.
Outside, blustery, hot wind reclaims us. I let it wash over me and bring me to my senses.
“That lady had no right to talk to us like that,” I say to Mama.
“Violet.” Mama is firm. “Didn’t you see them? The daughter is…in a delicate condition and needs rest. She doesn’t seem well. And the son is injured.” Even the simple mention of the boy makes his face flash through my mind again. “Best to let them have it.”
I wonder if I’ll see him again anytime soon.
Before we find a block manager, we stop at the restroom.
It’s hard to estimate just how long the trip took from Los Angeles to here.
Our assembly spot was the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple.
From there, we were taken by bus to the Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia.
We got off to stretch our legs before being ordered back on with others.
Military police with rifles accompanied us.
They made us draw the blinds over the bus windows, but I slid a finger around it, pulling it back enough to see out.
I watched as the terrain turned from familiar city streets full of people and cars to hills littered with white rocks and brush, and then, finally, to nothing.
Nothing but an open wasteland of desert rimmed in shadowy mountains.
Chaotic thoughts punctuated my mind—I wondered if we’d locked the print shop when we’d left or if it even mattered and where I’d left the college application I didn’t need anymore, and whether the faulty clasps on Otōsan’s suitcase had held through his horrible travels.
A woman outside the restroom agrees to watch our bags so we don’t have to bring them inside.
She calls it a latrine. As we enter, the floorboards quiver as though they aren’t secured to the foundation.
I come to a stop. A row of toilets greets us.
There are no stalls, only the toilets sitting side by side, so close to each other that I’d imagine shoulders could easily brush.
Near the entrance, women congregate. Some are as horrified as I am.
Others plunge ahead, faces fixed and eyes down.
“Mama!” I exclaim, because I don’t have words to put to this horror. Somehow, I will have to figure out the biologically impossible and never go to the bathroom until we leave. Mama surveys the situation. “I can’t.”
“Shush, shush.” Decisively, she strides into the bathroom.
I follow in her wake, crumpling like a thin sheet of newspaper wadded by a hand.
We stop in front of one of the toilets. She motions me forward and turns, holding out her skirt to hide me.
I sink onto it, grateful for my own dress to settle around the basin.
Even then, heat spreads over my body. I understand why the woman called it a latrine.
It isn’t a restroom at all. Forget the elegant rooms with upholstered seating and vanities in the cinemas and restaurants in Los Angeles or even the bathrooms at school with lipstick writing on the mirrors.
This is the opposite, so primitive it feels subhuman.
After, I do the same for Mama, holding out my dress as far as I can, as though the thin fabric can make shelter where there is none.
We are put in barrack 12 of a different block. When we saw barrack 7, I was distracted by the beautiful, strange family. Particularly the son. This time, there is nothing to distract me.
The barrack sits on concrete footings, held off the ground, suspended in the air.
It’s made from cheap pine board nailed to an A-frame and covered in tar paper.
Gaps show between the planks. Thin fingers of wind pry inside, clawing through the walls, the ceiling, the floor.
There’s no true separation between us and the other families; only sheets and blankets partition us off into a tiny area.
A bare light bulb hangs over a primitive stove with a can of oil.
Steel army cots crouch close to the ground.
The mattresses are bizarrely misshapen. I venture forward and touch one of them.
Immediately, I pull back as though it might bite me.
Straw.
It’s a tick mattress stuffed with straw.
An elderly couple peers around the nearest sheet to greet us, their gummy smiles soft in their faces.
Mama bows to them, and they bow back, their gray heads bobbing in unison.
Their names are George and Yua Kimura and they are from San Pedro.
They don’t speak English well, so they converse quietly with Mama in Japanese.
Every now and then they switch to English, and I hear sentences I understand.
Mr. Kimura worked at the Star-Kist cannery on Terminal Island.
Mrs. Kimura worried about his back, working there.
Now that he’s here, he doesn’t have to work, but he still won’t rest, so Mrs. Kimura still worries.
They give us a gift, as though welcoming us into their home. A Buddha icon printed on wood. Mama accepts it graciously, but I know she won’t display it since she’s Christian.
Then Mama reads her Bible and I draw a picture on the back of a letter for Otōsan.
I sketch out the fence with its barbed wire and posts.
Ocean waves spring from my pencil, finding me even here.
They swirl around the fence, tangling it in seaweed.
Then there’s nothing to do but go to bed.
I lie on the mattress, the unfamiliar ticking fabric rough against my skin and the straw rustling with every movement.
I can’t sleep. I can’t relax. Shifting shapes dance across the sheets dividing the barrack, a show of silhouettes and shadows.
Mr. Kimura lets out tremendous, choking snores, and every twenty minutes or so Mrs. Kimura murmurs at him in Japanese.
Someone talks in their sleep. An urgent, whispered fight between another couple drifts to me.
I hold the deer in my hand. I think about how many times I saw Otōsan do the same. Eventually, quietly as a whisper, a soft hum comes from inside it. Only then am I finally able to find sleep.
The next morning, I’m awakened by hands batting at my face. I crack my eyelids. Mama hovers above me.
“Good morning to you, too,” I grumble, sitting up.
“Stay still,” she orders, and continues her ministrations.
I’m covered in a dusty film. It must’ve blown through the slats as we slept.
Dust coats my skin like granules of sugar on the rusk toast Mama makes for breakfast back home.
She’s already dressed for the day, but particles cling to her eyebrows.
I wipe them off her while she vigorously brushes the dust off me.
“There’s no school yet,” she says. “But I talked to another mother at the restroom this morning. Some parents who are teachers are holding classes for high school students. It’s outdoors, around block six.
You need to go so you don’t get behind. By fall they’ve said there will be an official school with professional staff. ”
It’s almost enough to make me collapse back into this ungodly approximation of a bed.
School in the fall. We’ve been told we’ll likely stay here until the war is over.
Everyone is optimistic that America will make fast work of Hitler…
but even the most optimistic predictions are that it will take years for the war to end.
Which means we will likely be trapped in this ghost town of a place for years.
Years. I hardly survived the first night.
“I’ve learned there’s work,” Mama continues, undeterred. “All sorts of it. I’m going to get a job. You go to the classes, and we will meet again here for lunch at noon. Then we will go to the mess hall together.”