The family all spoke Japanese to one another inside the house, easily reverting to English whenever I was part of the conversation. Chiyo and Kenji were kind to me, and I knew I was welcome in their house, but I could also tell they weren’t sure if it was wise for Mariko to prefer my company over that of every Japanese girl she knew at the camp. On the day I was finally going to see Kenji’s hives, I asked Papa and Mommi and Max to come, too. My parents had been wanting to meet the Inoues and ascertain for themselves if Mariko’s parents were comfortable with her and me being such good friends. I just wanted the parents to meet.
We walked to the edge of the citrus grove, where the hives were kept in white cabinets that looked like bureaus for pajamas and underwear. The end of September was near and the air was at last turning slightly cool in the late afternoon. The low-hanging sun hit the bees at just the right angle, so that their little gold and black bodies glimmered as they buzzed about the structures.
We stood back from the hives at a safe distance as Kenji moved about them in protective gear. He opened drawer after drawer and removed pieces of honeycomb, working quietly and slowly, like a white ghost, puffing smoke onto the bees from a little can with a long snout to calm them. The bees acted as if they couldn’t even see him, or if they could, they didn’t care.
“The smoke makes it hard for them to smell my father,” Mariko murmured to us. “If a bee smells an intruder, it will alarm all the other bees. But if they can’t smell him, they won’t perceive him as a danger.”
Kenji put the pieces in mason jars and screwed on the lids tight. The jars he placed in a wooden box that also had a lid. With all the drawers closed now, Kenji began to step out of his coverings. Then he picked up the box with his gear over his arm and started walking to where we—all my family and Mariko—were standing, watching him. When he reached us, he bowed and then shook Papa’s hand. They had just exchanged names when Chiyo arrived with a plate of manju—sweet Japanese dumplings filled with red bean jam.
While the parents made polite talk and nibbled on the manju, Mariko, Max, and I ate our sweets with gusto and then dared one another to see how close each one of us would step to the hives. I kept an ear trained toward our parents’ conversation, to pick up on any thread of talk that might somehow mean a complication for Mariko and me. But they chatted about the things ordinary parents talk about when their teenage children become friends and the mothers and fathers meet. They did not talk about the war, or the armed guards holding us hostage here, or the subtle friction between the two major nationalities at the camp.
Our parents would not be attending game night together or walking side by side to the post office or sitting on the bus together on one of those infrequent shopping trips to the city. But they were friends now; not like Mariko and I were, but at least our dads had shaken hands and talked about life as it used to be when one was a chemist and one owned a vegetable and herb shop, and our moms had traded tips on how to get creative with what was available at the marketplace. Mommi had told Chiyo the manju was delicious and that she’d send over some pfeffernussen the next time she baked some.
Max asked Kenji if he could help him at the hives sometime—much to Mommi’s alarm—and Mariko’s father said that his help would be most welcome. Too soon we had to start walking back home to be in place before the twilight accounting.
At school, Nell seemed both put out and impressed that I had so quickly found a friend in Mariko Inoue. Nell’s family and the Inoues had arrived in Crystal City about the same time, so they had met each other in the last two months of eighth grade. But Nell had apparently been given the same advice she’d tried to give me—about staying to my own kind—and she hadn’t made any effort to get to know Mariko. In the weeks after Mariko and I became friends, though, Nell would sometimes sit by Mariko and me at lunch, with a quiet and reticent Nathalie in tow. And I’d often sit at lunch with Mariko and her Japanese American friends, none of whom she knew before coming to Crystal City. They were from San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco—wondrously Spanish-sounding places I had only ever seen spelled out on a map—and they sounded as American as I did. And sometimes Mariko and I would just sit by ourselves at lunch and talk about the kinds of things young teenagers talked about, things that had nothing to do with war or detention camps or the ache of lost freedoms.
One early October afternoon, when Mariko and I were at her quarters after school, she asked if I wanted to see the book she was writing. I did, of course. From the day she first told me she was writing one, I’d wanted to see it.
We were in the room she shared with her sister. Kaminari and Tomeo both worked at the camp administration building after school—Kaminari worked in the typing room and Tomeo helped with translating for the Latin American Japanese. Kenji was at the hives and Chiyo was at a Victory Hut where a team of Japanese women had taken on the task of making large batches of tofu—a staple of the Japanese diet—which was a soft, custard-like food made from soybeans. Mariko reached under her mattress and withdrew a notebook, the ledger type, where the pages are already bound inside. The cover was a tightly woven salmon color.
It looked like a real book. I must have looked duly impressed. Mariko laughed.
“I’m only on page forty,” she said, pleased with my awe. “I figure I have another hundred to go.” She hesitated a moment before extending it toward me.
I reached for the book and opened it to the first page. Mariko had penmanship like mine—not perfect, but not illegible, either. The words had been written in pencil and the sentences bore evidence of erasures here and there.
I can still remember the first few lines.
Long ago in the land of Akari, a king and queen, who very much wanted a son to continue the royal line, had a baby girl. They loved their daughter, but still yearned for a son. The following year another girl was born, and the next year, another. Then many years went by and the queen did not have any more children. Doctors were consulted, and magicians and priests and wise men. No one could tell her why she’d not had any more children. Finally, when their daughters were ten, nine, and eight, the queen found herself with child again. This baby, she knew, would be the longed-for son. She was sure of it. But when the time came for the baby to be born, the fourth child was also a girl. They named her Calista, and she was not like her three sisters, who liked to play with dolls and were afraid to get their hands dirty and who danced about in frilly dresses. Calista was not like them at all.
Mariko took back the book after I’d read the first page and I told her I thought her story was very good.
“So is Calista a tomboy?” I asked.
Mariko looked at me with a furrowed brow, as though I had made a critical error in thinking. “She is herself,” Mariko said.
“I like her,” I said. Because I did.
“I’m glad.” Mariko smiled as she slid the book back under her bed. “I’m not sure I’m much of a novelist, though. Starting was easy, and because I was so bored at Manzanar, I wrote quite a bit there, but the farther along I go the harder it is to know what to write. I think that’s why I want to work instead as a theater critic or maybe as a travel reporter.” Mariko tucked the blanket that helped conceal the notebook tight under the mattress and then turned to me as she sat back on her knees. “But even so, Calista is someone I want to be like. You know? I want to be brave like she is. Like she had to be.”
I was quiet for a moment as these words hung between us. I was reminded of what Papa had said to me in that sweltering train car as Max and Mommi slept.
“My father thanked me for being brave for my mother,” I said, sharing my thoughts aloud with Mariko. “But . . . I didn’t feel like I’d been brave. I still don’t. I was afraid the whole time he was gone. If you’re a brave person, don’t you know it? Don’t you feel it?”
Mariko was quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe being brave is different from being unafraid. If you’re not afraid, what is there to be brave about?”
We heard the front door open then and the sound of Chiyo’s voice.
“Do you want to help me with my story from time to time?” Mariko whispered as we started to rise to our feet.
I nodded, glad to have been asked, but unsure if I could help Mariko with even one sentence. I didn’t think of myself as a highly creative person.
Still, from then on, whenever I was at Mariko’s house and she’d pull Calista’s story out from under her mattress for us to work on, I felt as though I was being given a chance to imagine the kind of person I might dare to be, even when all hope seemed lost.
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