“Man, you’ve really got that Japanese fatalism jazz down pat. Ease up, Sis. It’s not the end of the world.” He gave her a fraternal pat on the back, then he and Stanley walked out to the main road to wait for the school bus.
Ruth met up with Cricket and they walked together to what was now known as Florin East Grammar School, its tar-paper roof patched over several times in the past few years, its green stucco walls fading in the bright sun to a pale lime. Cricket told her not to worry about what other kids thought, but that was easy for her to say—she was barely five feet tall.
They joined the crowd of students entering the school’s courtyard. Ruth was now a whole head taller than most of the Nisei girls and half a head taller than most boys. She felt like a giraffe striding amid a herd of penguins.
Worse: the penguins took notice. Heads turned, faces tilted up, eyes stared, violating not just her privacy but all Japanese norms of propriety. Instinctively she slouched as she entered the school, navigating the corridors in search of the eighth-grade classroom and greeted with such bon mots as:
“Wow, Ruth, you got tall as a Maypole over the summer!” said a girl.
Ruth smiled. She always smiled. But she wanted to say: Yes, and from up here I can see that dandruff problem of yours.
“Hey, stringbean, what’s the weather like up there?” said another.
This was invariably asked with a self-delighted laugh, as if he or she were the first human being on earth to conceive of this knee-slapper.
She wanted to dump the content of her thermos on his head and say: It’s raining.
“Aw, shaddup, bigmouth!” Cricket yelled at the last boy, but this only attracted more attention. Ruth cringed.
“Cricket, don’t,” Ruth begged. “It just makes things worse.”
Finally they reached their classroom. Now came the second most humiliating part of the day, as Ruth squeezed her gangly lower limbs under a school desk that seemed built for a Munchkin. She had not been able to cross her legs in class since fifth grade.
Recess was for most students a welcome respite, but for Ruth it was just another interlude in hell. Boys and girls alike played volleyball, tetherball, tag, or hide-and-seek. Ruth was no good at any of these. Hide-and-seek? Ha. Where did you hide when you were as tall as the Statue of Liberty? Tag? Her legs were long, so kids assumed she would be a good runner, but her still-growing limbs were slow to answer her brain’s orders and she often tripped over herself, landing flat on her face. There was nothing funnier than seeing a giant being brought down. The one time she had played volleyball, her freakishly long arms launched the ball with such velocity that it zoomed straight across the net and hit Cora Okabe square in the chest, propelling her backward into Lulu Koizumi, both girls toppling like tenpins. Ruth was horrified but neither of them were seriously hurt and graciously did not blame her for it. Fortunately, no one ever asked her to play volleyball again.
Her first day back eventually ended and as she left the school building, there was more droll banter about her height. But the worst remark was delivered not at top voice but sotto voce, two girls giggling and whispering:
“I bet she’s really a boy.”
Tears sprang to Ruth’s eyes and she ran all the way home. She entered the house weeping, and filthy from the dust she had kicked up along the way.
She kicked off her shoes and went straight upstairs. When Etsuko saw her, Ruth just gave her a look that said don’t comfort me, her bedroom door slamming shut behind her. She fell onto her bed and wept into her pillow.
After a few minutes there was a familiar scratching at the door. Ruth opened it to admit Mayonaka. Ruth picked her up and brought her to the bed, where she curled up on Ruth’s arm, offering warmth and comfort, as always, soothing Ruth’s troubles with her purr.
Ruth skipped supper, but when the house was quiet she crept downstairs, pilfered some bread and jam from the kitchen, then slipped out the back door. She went to Bucky’s stall and combed his mane, feeling calmer in his gentle presence. She gave him a kiss on his muzzle, then went over to the redwood split-rail fence that surrounded the corral, climbed it, and sat down on the top rail. It wasn’t comfortable, but she didn’t want to be comfortable right now. She sat there in the gathering twilight, eating her bread and jam, staring out at endless rows of green strawberry plants and painterly strokes of gold and purple in the sky above a distant treeline.
After a few minutes she heard someone behind her and turned to see Ralph. “Hi,” he said, swinging his short legs over the top rail. “Rough day?”
“Yeah. You?”
“It was all right.”
Now that he was closer, even in the dimming light, Ruth could see that he had a bruise above his left eye. “What happened to your eye?” she asked.
He shrugged it off. “Nothing. I’m swell.”
“Give.”
“Aw, just some guys horsing around. Kind of a … tradition.”
“Did somebody hit you?” she said, alarmed.
“Naw, that’s not it.” He shrugged, as if it were nothing important. “There’s these two hakujin guys. Every year, first day of classes, they got their little routine they go through.”
“Routine? What are you talking about?”
“They pick me up, turn me upside down, and lower me into a big barrel with my feet sticking out. That’s their little joke,” he said matter-of-factly.
Ruth was shocked. “But that’s … awful!”
“Eh, all the Nisei kids from Florin get picked on, Sis. Stanley got tossed into the showers once with his clothes on. Sometimes there’s a fistfight.”
“How—did you get out of the barrel?”
“Easy. I shift my weight—before I pass out ’cause I’m upside down—and when the barrel rolls onto the ground, I crawl out backward. Banged myself in the forehead when I hit this time, that’s why the bruise.”
“And they do this to you every year?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’m hoping for one more growth spurt. Just enough so I don’t fit so easy in the barrel.”
“You never told me any of this before,” she said softly.
“And you better not tell anyone I told you—even Stanley.”
“I promise.”
She reached out and took his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry, Ralph.” She felt suddenly ashamed. “I … guess I don’t have it so bad.”
“Naw, you do. We both do. But we’ll live.”
She squeezed his hand, the way her mother squeezed hers. He smiled.
Silently they watched the last traces of the sun’s light retreating below the treetops, urgently waiting for puberty to end.
Chapter 6
1931–1935
By the time Ruth entered high school she had grown another inch, standing five feet five, certain that P. T. Barnum would be calling any day now. AMAZING! COLOSSAL! screamed the circus banners of her imagination. SEE THE ORIENTAL GIANTESS! HEAR HER TRAGIC STORY! STEP RIGHT UP!
At least this was what she envisioned on the school bus en route to her first day at Elk Grove Union High School. She was more than a head taller than most of the Nisei girls on the bus; even sitting down they all seemed like Lilliputians to her. Everyone on the bus shared some anxiety about going to a new school. But when Ruth stepped inside the large, red-brick building—so much more imposing than Florin East—her worries evaporated.
Elk Grove was not a segregated school, like Florin; the student body was made up of about three hundred whites, forty or fifty Nisei, and a few Hispanics. Walking its hallways for the first time, Ruth was astonished to find herself at eye level with most of the white male students. Even most white girls were only a few inches shorter than she; a few were nearly as tall. And to her wonderment, Ruth felt downright petite alongside the school’s six-foot-tall basketball and football players. No longer was she a giraffe among penguins. She felt almost … normal.