As I started to rise from my chair, my class schedule fell from my grasp and floated to the floor, where it was immediately swept up in a tangle of feet.
By the time I had it back in my hand, Nathalie had led Nell out of the room. I tried to dash after them, but there were too many students also wanting to get to the exit. When I finally made it to the hallway I could see only black-haired heads with a smattering of fair-haired ones, all farther ahead. One of them turned; it was Nell looking for me, but I don’t think she saw me before Nathalie had pulled her around the corner. I pushed my way ahead, excusing myself until I was at the same corner and I saw the two of them enter a classroom past the main entrance that we’d all come through earlier.
When I got there seconds later, the classroom had already filled to the last few open desks. I saw a sea of mostly Japanese faces, twenty-five at least, and only eight students of German descent. Nathalie and Nell were in the middle of the room, seated at desks that were side by side. Nell was haggling with a large boy with reddish brown hair who had apparently just folded himself into a third desk next to Nell. She was telling him that someone else was sitting there and that he had to move.
“I don’t see anybody sitting here,” he said, and then he turned around to say something I couldn’t hear to another German boy sitting behind him.
Nell looked to the door and saw me standing there. She shook her head in annoyance and nodded toward the boy who had taken the seat she’d tried to save for me.
She began to look around the room for another seat and so did I. Three Caucasian boys sitting together in the back all glanced at me as I stood surveying the room and then looked away, disinterested. Two German American girls, deep in conversation, sat near the trio of boys but with no seats next to them. A lone German American girl, seated on the far outside aisle, was staring out a window. There were only two empty seats left now: one surrounded by Japanese boys on all sides, and another at the back next to a Japanese girl who would change my life. Nell saw the open desk by this girl, too, and mouthed, “Take it!” She’d no doubt also seen that the only other available chair was surrounded by Japanese boys.
As I moved toward the Japanese girl, I saw she had a charm bracelet on her wrist that looked remarkably like one I’d been given by Mommi and Papa for Christmas two years earlier and that I was wearing that morning. She was talking to another Japanese girl and didn’t look up at me as I passed her to get to the desk next to hers. I sat down and noticed the old desk was etched with graffiti. At the topmost edge of my desk someone had carved a four-word commentary: You shred it, wheat.
“Hey. We have the same bracelet.” Mariko broke into my silence, her voice sounding remarkably ordinary, like my own.
I looked up from my desktop and turned to face her, not knowing her name yet. She had porcelain skin and shining black hair that fell like a silk fringe just past her shoulders and that she kept off her face with mother-of-pearl barrettes. Her beautiful slanted eyes appeared nearly closed as she smiled at me, and I wondered how she saw anything at all—a stupid pondering as I look back at it now, as Mariko saw so much that I couldn’t see. She was small boned and perhaps a few inches shorter than I was. Her blouse was pale yellow, and she wore a plaid pleated skirt similar in style to the one I was wearing. Her Keds had surely been white once but were now the color of weak tea from too many days strolling about in Texas dust. From the neck up, Mariko looked every inch as though she had materialized from some faraway city in the Far East, but her voice, her clothes, her anklet socks—all of them could have been mine.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied dazedly. “I mean, I saw that, too.”
“My name’s Mariko Inoue,” she said. “I’m from LA. You’re new, aren’t you?”
I nodded, still shocked at how American she sounded. She was from LA. Los Angeles.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Elise Sontag.”
“Sontag. That’s the German word for Sunday, isn’t it?”
I gaped at her. How could she know a thing like that? “Um, yeah,” I said after a moment’s hesitation.
“You start to pick up on some of the words people use around here,” she said, noting my astonishment.
The teacher who had earlier introduced herself as Miss Goldsmith swept into the room as Mariko said this, her arms laden with books and the class roster. Mariko turned her attention to the front of the class.
As the teacher placed what she held on a gray metal desk, I noticed for the first time that there were pictures on the wall, copies of Renaissance paintings I didn’t know the names of then, though I do now. Venus and the Three Graces, The Annunciation, Head of a Woman, Raphael’s Madonna of the Rose. Their wooden frames were scuffed and nicked, and the colors in the reproductions had faded, suggesting they’d hung for many years somewhere else, a sunny art room in a Texas high school perhaps. They’d probably been placed in a warehouse of other old and obsolete classroom equipment out of which the camp schools had come by their meager furnishings.
Miss Goldsmith shushed those still chatting in the honeyed tone she had used earlier to introduce herself. The room fell quiet.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” she said pleasantly, as though we really did have a say in what we did next.
Miss Goldsmith proceeded to call the roll, struggling rather comically to pronounce Japanese first and last names, coating every foreign word with her lilting southern accent. When she got to my name, she pronounced my two-syllable last name with three syllables. I don’t quite know how she did it. I raised my hand and said, “Here,” and she smiled in my direction and marked the roster.
Then Miss Goldsmith went over the classroom rules and her expectations. I got the impression rather quickly that she was a good teacher and most eager to see us learn but would not tolerate disorderliness or apathy or disrespect. She told us she planned to put on plays during the school year for extra credit, but also for our enjoyment, and that she hoped we’d want to take part.
Our first assignment was to pair up with a classmate and interview him or her so that we could write a 750-word essay about our partner that we would read aloud the following day. We’d also be turning it in, so spelling and grammar mattered, as did neatness.
The Japanese girl to whom Mariko had been talking when I’d sat down turned to her now and asked if she could partner with her. My heart fell a little even though I’d already figured I’d have to walk up the aisle to the sullen girl by the window, whose name I now knew from the roll call was Ruthie, and beg her to talk to me since Nathalie had nabbed Nell the second Miss Goldsmith stopped talking. But to my surprise Mariko told the girl that she was already partnered with me.
This other girl gave me a surprised sideways glance and then said, “Oh.” She turned away to ask someone else.
Mariko leaned in close to me. “You don’t mind, do you? Yuka’s nice, but way too Japanese, if you know what I mean. I just want to talk to someone who knows what Twinkies are. God, I miss Twinkies.”
I smiled. “I don’t mind.”
The room began to buzz with little conversations around us as Miss Goldsmith handed out mimeographed questionnaires we were to use for our interviews.
“You want me to go first and ask you about you?” Mariko asked as she took up a pencil.
“Um. Sure. Okay.”
The questions were easy—nothing complicated that would take the conversation down the road that led to how all of us got to Crystal City. Yet supplying Mariko with the answers nearly made me cry. Where was I born? Who were my parents, and my brother; what they were like? What was my favorite color, my favorite flavor of ice cream, favorite movie star, favorite season? Blue. Pistachio. Cary Grant. Summer.
Then she asked me what I wanted to be.
“Maybe a nurse. Or a teacher,” I said, glad to leave the realm of my most intimate likes and dislikes to enter an arena that seemed as far off as a fairy tale. “Or a gardener. I like making things grow.”
Mariko looked up from the sheet of paper. “You don’t know which?”
“What?”
She smiled slightly. “You don’t know which you want to be?”
I hadn’t to that point sensed any urgency to puzzle out what I wanted to do with my life. It hadn’t seemed to matter much since I’d always figured I would live my life in Davenport. I’d marry there, have a family there, grow old there. Die there. I could imagine myself being a nurse or a teacher or a gardener in Davenport. I liked helping people, teaching seemed an admirable endeavor, and I did love seeing things grow. I had plenty of time to figure it out.
I shrugged. “I guess I don’t.”
Mariko tipped her head toward me, her pencil poised over the line where she was supposed to write down my answer as to my future aspirations. “Really? You don’t know?”