As she stepped out of the boundaries of the Japanese community, Mariko noticed that people were now not just staring at her, but glaring at her, pulling their children away from her. “Filthy Jap,” one balding man said as he started to pass her on the sidewalk. He was walking a little brown dog on a leash that looked up at Mariko and wagged its tail. “Go back where you belong!” the man spat. She ran from him but felt his gaze on her long after he was no longer in earshot.
The sideways glances, the angry stares, the looks of disapproval and disdain and disgust, continued as she made her way from boulevard to boulevard as fast as she could.
When she finally made it to Sharon’s apartment building, she ran up the stairs to 2C and rang the doorbell. The door opened and Sharon looked at her with an odd mix of affection, fear, and dread. Her friend put a finger to her lips, looked behind her to see if anyone in the household was wondering who was at the door. Then she stepped out onto the landing and closed the door.
“I don’t know if my mom should see you here. My brother’s . . . he’s in the navy, you know.”
Cold fear rippled through Mariko. She had forgotten. “He’s . . . he’s okay, isn’t he?”
“He wasn’t in Hawaii, but still. Mom’s pretty upset. Dad, too.”
“I’m . . . I didn’t . . . I can’t . . .” But Mariko couldn’t find the words to express her own confusion over what had happened.
“I know,” Sharon said, her eyes filling with tears. “But I think you should go. My brother . . .”
Her friend did not finish her sentence and Mariko could see the conflict in Sharon’s thoughts. America was at war with Japan. Sharon was American. She was Japanese. Her closest friend was torn between allegiances.
Mariko felt inside her skirt pocket for the note she had written to Charles. Sharon had to give the note to him before her friend’s loyalties fell too heavily on the side of fear and family. No one else could help her.
“Please,” Mariko said softly as her eyes pricked with tears. “Please give this note to Charles? We’re being evacuated. Please?” She extended the envelope to her friend.
Sharon, her eyes also glassy with emotion, took the note and nodded. “I’m so sorry, Mariko,” Sharon said, as she put the note in her own skirt pocket. “I’m so sorry this is happening.”
“I am, too,” Mariko whispered. She took a step forward and wrapped Sharon in an embrace. “Tell Lupe good-bye for me?”
Her friend shuddered in her arms. “I will,” Sharon said.
“I’ll try to write you.”
Sharon nodded and pulled away, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Where are they taking you?”
Mariko shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
Both girls heard a voice from inside Sharon’s apartment. Her mother was calling for her.
“You should go,” Sharon whispered.
Mariko started to leave, but then stopped and turned. “Don’t forget me, Sharon. And please tell Charles not to forget me, will you? I don’t know if I will see him before we go. I don’t think I will. I don’t even know where he lives. Will you tell him not to forget me?”
Sharon nodded wordlessly as tears slid down her freckled cheeks.
“Sharon?” said a voice from within the apartment on the other side of the door.
Mariko flew down the stairs without looking back.
Over the next few days Mariko hoped against reason that somehow Sharon would come to Little Tokyo with a response from Charles.
But her friend did not come.
* * *
? ? ?
Mariko’s mother could not do what the FBI agent had suggested she do with the household goods. The dishes and crystal, the rice bowls, the teapots, the silks and tablecloths and woodblock artwork—all the treasures from Japan—Chiyo could not bring herself to sell them for one-tenth of their value. Other families up and down the streets of Little Tokyo were holding what were widely being called “evacuation sales”—a pathetic euphemism for what they really were: heartbreaking efforts to quickly dispose of their belongings. But the buyers, nearly all non-Japanese, knew everyone in Little Tokyo was desperate. If you were offered ten dollars for a nearly new stove, you took it. Chiyo could not so devalue all the visible things of what had been a happy life.
Mariko awoke in the middle of the night on the thirteenth of December to the sound of shattering glass and porcelain. Kaminari, who had worked ten hours that day in the shop, lay in her bed, snoring lightly. Mariko crept out of the room and went into the kitchen, where a light was burning. Her mother was leaning over the windowsill, throwing dishes out onto a cement slab at the head of the vegetable patch two stories below. The sound of the breakage was beautiful and terrible at the same time. Remaining plates, bowls, cups, and saucers sat on the countertop at her mother’s elbow, ready to be hurled to the ground.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” Mariko asked, even though it was obvious what her mother was doing.
Chiyo startled at Mariko’s voice but quickly recovered. “We can’t take these with us. I don’t want anyone else having them, Mariko. I don’t want anyone who hates us because we’re Japanese eating off them.” Her mother picked up a plate and calmly tossed it out. A second later, the sound of its impact against the cement reached their ears.
“This is how I want to say good-bye to the life we had here,” Chiyo continued as though speaking to herself now, not her youngest daughter. “We should get to decide that at least.” She picked up a powder blue teacup with willow branches painted across it and turned to Mariko, extending the arm that held the cup.
Mariko looked at the teacup but did not reach out her hand to take it. “We’re not coming back here? Ever?”
Her mother peered at her. “Come back to what? What will there be to come back to?”
“Our life! Our friends,” Mariko said. Charles.
“All of our friends will already be with us.” Chiyo wagged the cup in her hand toward Mariko.
“Not all my friends are Japanese, Mommy.”
Her mother smiled without mirth. “Oh, yes, they are. I assure you any friend you have now is Japanese.”
Mariko could not tell her mother about Charles. She would not understand. Mariko reached for the cup and curled her hand around it. She could do this for her mother. She could break all the dishes they had if it would make her mother less sad about what was happening to them. Because when the war was over, Mariko would convince her parents to come back to Los Angeles. And when they returned, it wouldn’t have to be to Little Tokyo. They wouldn’t have to live in a house full of Japanese heirlooms anymore. They were Americans. They could live in an American neighborhood and eat macaroni and cheese on new plates. They could eat fried chicken. And hot dogs. And Twinkies. Yes, they were Japanese, but this was not Japan. This was America, and Los Angeles was their home. Sharon and Lupe were here. Charles was here. Her life was here.
Mariko stepped to the counter, leaned toward the window, and dangled the cup over the ledge. Then she let it go. The shattering sounded a little like applause.
The next morning, the fourteenth of December and a Sunday, Mariko awoke late. Her mother and siblings were already downstairs in the shop, disposing of the last of their inventory. She left the shop and the grim task taking place there and went out to the vegetable patch. The ruins of the contents of the cupboards were a constellation of shards glistening in the morning sun. The broken pieces looked a bit like pretty shells on the beach if you didn’t look too closely. She wondered if her mother would want her to sweep up the remains or leave them as a reminder to anyone who came to this place after them that they had lived here, had eaten slices of birthday cake off the shattered plates, and morning toast, and teriyaki.
As she gazed at the broken bits, she became aware of the odor of wet ash, and she turned toward the garden, where the smell was coming from. A smoldering pile of charred remnants of lace and silk and linen lay among the last of the winter squash. Her mother must have stayed up after they had broken all the dishes. After Mariko had gone back to bed, Chiyo had apparently come downstairs to the vegetable patch, her arms laden with linens that she would not be able to fit in her suitcase. She had made a funeral pyre of them, setting them ablaze, and perhaps watching as the flames happily consumed the fabrics. Mariko was still staring at the wisps of lingering smoke when she heard someone say her name.
She looked toward the chain-link fence behind her that kept freeloaders and the neighbors’ dogs out of the vegetable garden. Standing there with his fingers laced through the links was Charles Kinwood.
For a moment Mariko could only stare, afraid that if she blinked or said his name, he would evaporate as mirages and visions do.
“Please,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
She strode to the fence, in awe that Charles was standing in the little alley behind the shop, wanting to speak with her.
“Sharon gave me your note,” he said when she reached the fence. “I tried to come sooner but I couldn’t.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, barely a whisper.
“I couldn’t let you leave without talking to you.”