“Do you know what you want to be?” I asked, but I could tell she already did know.
“I want to be a writer. I want to work in New York and write plays or maybe be a theater critic.” She sounded so sure that this was her future. She was as sure of this as Max was that he’d be a cowboy someday, even though he’d only ever ridden ponies in a circle at the county fair.
Miss Goldsmith announced at that moment that if we hadn’t already done so, we needed to switch and start interviewing the second person. I asked Mariko the same questions she had asked me. She was born in Los Angeles. Her parents were Kenji and Chiyo Inoue; they’d both been born in Tokyo and had emigrated to the United States in December 1923. She had an older brother and sister—fraternal twins—named Tomeo and Kaminari. They were sixteen. Her favorite color was yellow; her favorite flavor of ice cream was maple pecan; favorite movie star was Clark Gable. Her favorite season was summer, just like me.
We were directed then to take out a fresh piece of notebook paper and begin our essays. There was to be no more talking unless it was to ask a clarifying question of our interviewee. Mariko began to write with ease, filling a quarter of a page with the details of my life before I’d written a sentence.
After a few minutes she leaned in and whispered, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I glanced down at the questionnaire, my heart instantly thrumming that this unbelievably personal question was on it.
But it wasn’t, of course. She just wanted to know. It was a question any teenage girl would ask another as they were becoming friends.
“No,” I whispered. “Do you?”
Her smile intensified, and the whites of her eyes disappeared into slits. “His name is Charles. He’s fifteen. My parents don’t know, though. He’s not Japanese.”
Our larger situation seemed to melt away a little. We were just two fourteen-year-old girls, sitting in class, whispering to each other when we were supposed to be working.
“I won’t say anything,” I promised.
“I write letters to him but my parents think I’m writing to a girl back home named Charlotte,” she murmured. “The censors think that’s his name, too.”
This made me laugh and I had to stifle it with a cough. Miss Goldsmith looked our way and nodded to the papers on our desks, a wordless admonition to get back to work.
Mariko bent down over her assignment and started writing again, but she whispered loud enough for me to hear, “Dear Charlotte. How are things in LA? I miss you so much. And I miss your . . . ki . . . kittens.”
Another laugh forced its way out of my mouth and I swallowed it back with an unconvincing coughing fit. From the front of the room Miss Goldsmith frowned and asked if she needed to come back there. I said, “No, ma’am.” Mariko was smiling happily as she continued to write.
The camp seemed to melt away a little more.
I felt like I’d made a friend. Not a camp friend, but a real friend. Like Collette had been. When English was over, Mariko said she’d show me the math classroom, as all ninth-graders had that class next. Our other classmates stared at us as we left English, mostly in surprised curiosity. Nell was the most amazed, I think. And maybe a little relieved. She and Nathalie had hit a rough spot in their friendship just before I’d arrived in July, which was the main reason Nell had spent the last half of the summer with me rather than her. But they’d been slowly mending what had been broken. And today, the first day of high school, I could see that Nathalie wanted Nell all to herself again. Nell glanced back at me as we filed out into the hallway, half in subtle irritation—I hadn’t taken her advice to keep to my own kind—and half in incredulity. But Nathalie tugged her back around. When we got to math class, Mariko and I sat in desks next to each other.
She could not stay for the last class of the day, which was art. Mariko and her siblings and nearly half of the other Japanese students were heading over to the Japanese school for the rest of their classes.
“Hey,” she said as she got ready to leave. “Want to get together after school? My father works the beehives in the citrus grove. You want to see them?”
In truth, I was scared to death of bees but I was happy and surprised she’d asked me. I told her yes.
As I walked into the art class alone, Nell motioned me to a chair at her table. When I sat down, Nathalie regarded me with quiet annoyance.
Nell turned to face me. “Why were you hanging around that Japanese girl all day?” she murmured, her brows crunched into a line of consternation.
I wish to this day I’d said, “Mariko’s not Japanese. She’s from California.” But I’d replied, “She’s . . . she was nice to me. She showed me around. I like her.”
“But . . . she’s not one of us,” Nell said.
Again, the right words didn’t occur to me until years later. I should have said, “I don’t think I’m one of you, either.”
“She’s nice,” I said instead, repeating what I’d just said a second earlier. Yet it was true. Mariko was nice. She had made the day a very nice day when it could’ve been an awful one. Nice was a word that I’d not been able to say in such a long time, and it encompassed so much in that moment. It truly did. Nice is a throwaway word until it’s not.
Nell shrugged in obvious disapproval. She might have said, It’s your life, if we’d said that colloquialism back then.
Nathalie, seated on Nell’s other side, said, not surprisingly, “Let her pick her own friends,” as though she were my ally.
“Mariko’s just a girl from Los Angeles,” I said, struggling to find better words to describe my new friend’s ordinariness. And then clarity flooded my mind for one shining second as the better words came. “We’re not our parents, you know.”
Nell laughed lightly. An annoyed little huff. “Then why are we here?” she said.
She was not expecting an answer, and I didn’t even try to cobble one together. The art teacher, a short little man with red cheeks like Santa Claus, brought the class to order and then proceeded to show us how to draw a dog.
Nell did not cease to be my friend that day. She never approved of my relationship with Mariko, but there were so few of us children of German parents at the American school, she needed me for those days when Nathalie was mad at her.
But I left that first day so eager to meet up with Mariko in the orange trees that I didn’t give Nell and Nathalie a backward glance. I left the building and ran to our triplex to drop off my schoolbag and ask if I could meet my new friend and her father in the citrus grove. I told Mommi my new friend’s father worked in the beehives in the grove and I wanted to see them.
Mariko’s father had already left when I got to the grove, which was located near the basketball courts and the sumo wrestling ring that the Japanese internees had been allowed to construct.
I didn’t meet Kenji Inoue that day, or his bees. On another day I would learn all about the hives. Instead, Mariko and I sat under an orange tree, ate some of its sweet fruit, and asked each other what we hadn’t been allowed to ask on Miss Goldsmith’s questionnaire: How in the world had we gotten there?
11
Mariko’s parents, Kenji and Chiyo Inoue, immigrated to the United States just months before the signing of the Johnson-Reed Act, a law that both served to limit the number of immigrants who could be admitted to the United States and outright banned the immigration of Arabs and Asians. The purpose apparently had been to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity, a concept that would be laughably funny if it weren’t so absurd. Every American I knew to that point was only a first-or second-generation native; their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had been immigrants. The pilgrims on the Mayflower had been immigrants. But the law had been signed, and few, if any, Japanese immigrated to the United States after the ink was dry.