“We each found our way to be content at Manzanar; you had to, you know,” Mariko said as we stopped in front of her quarters on Meridian Road, three short blocks from my triplex on Arizona. Her home looked exactly like mine except hers had bright marigolds and petunias planted in neat rows below the windows.
“I had my thirteenth birthday not long after we got there, and somehow it did seem like a special day. Charles sent me the bracelet.” Mariko held up her arm to indicate the charm bracelet we were both wearing. “I started hanging around the camp newspaper office because the lady who ran it was nice to me and gave me little notices to type up—movie showtimes and things like that. It was called the Manzanar Free Press. I thought that name was hilarious. I still do. But I loved working there. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. The reporters at the Manzanar paper couldn’t write about anything except what was happening right there at the camp. But I knew a real journalist got to travel and write stories about faraway places. Since we didn’t have any way to travel, I did it in my mind. I had started to write a book just before the attack on Pearl Harbor but hadn’t written in it since. I got it out again there at that camp. It’s a story about a warrior princess named Calista.”
“You’re writing a book?” I had never contemplated attempting such an adult activity, which is what I thought writing a book was.
“Don’t look so surprised. Anybody can write a book. Even in a detention camp. Especially in a detention camp. You can go anywhere you want and do anything you want in a story that you write. Anywhere and anything.”
Dusk was now all around us. Japanese families up and down Meridian were assembling in front of their homes. From within Mariko’s house I heard a woman’s voice call out for her. I was fairly certain Mommi or Papa was looking out our front door for me.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, not wanting to. It had been a long time—or at least it seemed that way—since I’d had a true friend to talk to.
“I know,” Mariko said. “I had fun today. I liked hearing about Iowa. And it was nice for a change talking to someone who isn’t Japanese. You remind me a little of my friend Sharon. She has eyes the same color as yours.”
“I had fun today, too,” I said, knowing I would have to run to be home now when the counting began.
“See you at school tomorrow!” Mariko called after me as she began walking toward her front door.
I took off running and got back to our triplex, out of breath, just as the jeep with the guards turned down our street.
My parents and Max were standing outside our door. Papa’s hands were on his hips, the pose of an angry and concerned father. Mommi didn’t look too pleased, either.
“Where have you been?” Papa exclaimed, mostly under his breath, since our neighbors on either side were also standing outside on their front steps.
“Mommi knew where I was,” I said lamely. What Papa was really asking—and we both knew it—was why I’d been away so long, not where I had been. He’d no doubt asked about me when he’d come home from the German school and Mommi had told him that I’d made a new friend whose father worked the beehives and that I’d gone with her to see them.
“I didn’t say you could be gone the rest of the day, Elise,” Mommi muttered quietly, also mindful of the proximity of our neighbors. “It doesn’t take all afternoon to see some beehives.”
I took my place beside them. Max looked up at me with scared eyes. He would confess to me later that evening that he thought I’d found a way through the fences and had escaped.
“We were getting to know each other,” I said to my parents, more in defense of my actions than in contrition. I wasn’t sorry I had stayed out too long. “We didn’t actually get to see the hives today because Mariko’s father had left already.”
“Mariko.” Papa gazed at me with an unreadable look.
“That’s her name.”
“She’s Japanese?”
“She’s a ninth grader, like me.”
The jeep rolled by our unit and the guard making his notations looked up at the three families to verify our number. Max waved to him and the man waved back. As the vehicle completed its trip down our street, all the families turned to go inside.
I thought my parents would want to know more about my new friend. I was ready to both defend and extol her. I wanted to tell them about the vegetable and herb shop, and how scared and sad everyone in Little Tokyo had been after Pearl Harbor. I wanted to tell them how Mariko’s father had been arrested just like Papa had been, and how Mariko’s mother had broken all her dishes and burned all her tablecloths because she couldn’t bring them with her and she didn’t want people who hated her enjoying them. I wanted to tell them Mariko and her family spent four months sleeping in a racehorse’s empty stall.
But they didn’t ask more about Mariko that day. They wanted to know about my first day of school, and how I liked my teachers, and what my assignments were. And then Papa told us all about his first day of school as a chemistry teacher teaching without chemicals.
I suppose my parents didn’t know what to make of my new friendship with a Japanese American girl from California on that first day. Looking back, I think they also assumed it was a flimsy friendship that wouldn’t last. How could it? They were thinking Mariko and I had nothing in common other than where we were living and why.
But the truth was, we were both American-born high school freshmen who wore the same charm bracelet and the same kind of skirt, who liked Twinkies and cute boys and Saturdays at the movies. I had started to forget that’s who I was.
I ended up telling Max all about Mariko rather than my parents, as he and I lay in the darkness in our room, with just a hanging sheet separating his bed from mine.
When I told him Mariko and her family had slept in a horse barn for four months, he raised the sheet to look at me in the pale moonlight sneaking in through a seam in the curtain. “Really? A horse barn?”
“Really.”
“Lucky,” Max said enviously, as he let the sheet fall back into place.
The next day and the next and the next, wherever Mariko was was where I wanted to be, and to my great relief, she was equally happy to have me for company. Before coming to Texas, Mariko had spent a year and a half in a forced all-Japanese community. The only Caucasians she regularly saw were guards and schoolteachers. Being a fair-skinned, honey blond German American with round eyes, I reminded her of the happy life she knew in Los Angeles, the one where Sharon and Lupe and Charles lived. By contrast, she didn’t remind me of anything in Iowa. Instead of calling to mind what awaited me back where I used to be, she’d shone a light on the winding road ahead. I wanted to have bigger dreams for my future, like she had for hers.
I met Kenji and Chiyo and the twins a few days later, following Mariko’s afternoon language classes at the Japanese school. I had seen Tomeo and Kaminari at the American high school, but they were seniors who avoided freshmen the way most high school seniors do. They were also both active in school government and in planning what they would do come May when they graduated and were no longer considered children.
Mariko told me that just before they left Manzanar, some Japanese Americans had been allowed to be released from the camp, if they pledged not to return to any of the three Pacific states. That might have been an option at the time for Mariko, her mother, and the twins, but Chiyo didn’t want to leave Manzanar, as she and the children had nowhere to go. The only family and friends they had in the United States were in California, a forbidden state.
And then Kenji had been made aware of the family internment camp in Texas. He had petitioned to be reunited with his family at Crystal City, and that request had been granted. It was possible Tomeo and Kaminari would leave Crystal City in May if they could make and keep the same pledge as those who had been released from Manzanar. Mariko said the idea was too bizarre to contemplate, that her siblings would leave and she and her parents would stay.
The inside of the Inoue house was very much like our home, with the same drab furniture and linens. But Kaminari, who was a budding artist, had painted posters that hung on the walls, of ocean landscapes and trees and flowers and the little Japanese children who played on their street. Their quarters also had a sweet and spicy tang in the air, very different from the fragrances that lingered after Mommi cooked.