ONE
FLIGHT
First it was the names that went. Names of her neighbors, names of her grandchildren. Sometimes the names of her two daughters, her only son.
She knew their faces, of course. The daughter with the sharp eyes, always inspecting her, pressing her onward—always onward!—to the bathroom, the kitchen, anywhere that was away from the door, where she’d hesitated, no longer certain of her direction, or why.
The other daughter was pale-faced and forgiving. When she wandered lost among the tomato vines in her yard, it was this daughter who clasped her hands firmly in hers.
The son did not visit often. He called once a month. Who could blame him? His mother, who couldn’t be trusted with the baby. Who couldn’t be trusted with herself. Even as a boy he’d been prudent. Preserving himself against the world’s imperfections.
Then, one day, the streets began to go. The stark, narrow one, shortcut to the schoolyard where her children used to wait, fidgeting and hungry, racing at the sight of her. Then the route to the drugstore; the turn to the post office; the short leafy distance to the bakery with shelves of cinnamon bread she liked, lightly buttered, on rainy afternoons.
Her neighbors began finding her. Strolling up and down the road, peering into windows she recognized but could no longer place. Sometimes they found her at the bus stop considering the direction of her home, which was not on any bus route. Each time, the neighbors took her elbow—the younger ones kindly, the older ones angrily—all of them threatening to tell on her.
But how could she stay home? The sky shimmering outside her window, the trees like shadow puppets dancing on the lawn, the promise of her tomatoes plumping in the yard Edward had cleared for her, years ago, when they were both still young and had half the mortgage to pay. She couldn’t help it, her body yearning for the weight of the globes, warm under cool running water. There was no room for her daughters’ warnings or her neighbors’ pity. Her feet simply took her there, down the steps into her bright garden.
* * *
—
HER FIRST tomato came to her in 1911, the year she turned thirteen, the year she first visited America. Small, yellow, pear-shaped: it was a gift from her father, plucked from the land that was to be her new summer home in California. The seeds were slimy, and the first time she bit the fruit, they splattered the soil, a dark phlegmy embarrassment. She hastily toed the spot, but her father, catching her, laughed. Watch out, everything root here.
She ended up potting that patch of soil and placing the terra-cotta by her bedroom window in the farmhouse that now held her summer things. Like her new frock, uncomfortably buxom beside her yukata, which waved like a happy kite when the breeze blew in from the rice paddy that belonged to her father’s cousin Bob. Bob, like her father, was an agronomist. Once known as Mitsuru, he was a reckless fox of a man, his many pockets jingling with ideas too modern for their hometown in Niigata, a rice farming region on the west coast of Japan. Her father, though, could never resist their allure, and Mitsuru, knowing this, often entangled him in regrettable schemes.
Bob left for California in 1906, and for over two years no one heard from him. But of course it was her father to whom Bob eventually wrote, telling him about the new strain of rice he was cultivating, sweet like home but suited to the California soil and climate. Her father leapt at the prospect. And though it would take a few seasons, the strain, a robust hybrid, would prove successful, surviving all the Land Acts and even the arsonists sent by the Asiatic Exclusion League, until Executive Order 9066 rounded up all the Bobs and transplanted them to Manzanar.
Yellow Pear, her father said, testing the shape of the language that would one day replace her own. That’s name.
The plant grew, despite the confines of the pot and window, and produced a single cluster of tomatoes that collected like dewdrops. It sat there enjoying the sun that dazzled the room every summer for three years until one afternoon an avalanche of books, loosed by an earthquake, battered its limbs and broke its spine.
Oh well, her father had laughed, squeezing his shoulders to his ears like his Americanized cousin. That’s life, huh!
* * *
—
SOMETIME IN the fall the kind-faced daughter began staying with her. At first she stayed only on weekends, then during the week as well. This daughter was quiet. She did not disturb the house even when she washed dishes or folded laundry. While this daughter was around, TV was forbidden, so they sat in the kitchen with a pot of tea and talked about the new hiring the daughter was in charge of: gentle prattle that soon gave way to a gentle prodding of memory.
Remember when we went apple-picking and you got caught with your mouth full of Gala—or was it McIntosh?
Remember the time at the movies when you got up to use the bathroom and ended up in the exact seat you’d left, but in a different theater, next to a different family, without realizing it?
Of course she did not remember these stories, which nudged a darkness but did not illuminate it. What flared in her were childhood images. Like the time her father took her ice-skating on the lake behind the house in Niigata. She was six then, enamored of her skates, which smelled of new leather and not the usual musk of her brother’s feet.
Hot sun on her shivery back. She remembered the glint of the ice, her slashing blades, her fear of sliced fingers. Her skates skipped: the surprise of hard ice on her back and her father’s swishing blades crisscrossing so close to her face she could taste the metal slicing her breath.
Two years later she did rip open her face. A deep curve from her left ear to her chin. An unbelievably clean wound for such a messy incident. Grabbing the leg of a sleeping dog! But how could she have known? The dog was a friend. So fortunate the scar had followed her jawline. So fortunate she had a pretty face, astonishingly hard to ruin. Naughty girl.
Only one girl ever asked about her scar. This girl was fair-haired and fair-skinned and spoke with a foreign accent. New to Niigata, she was prickly, her turbulent face flashing at the sound of her name, which no one could pronounce. Mar. Joh. Ree! One day Marjorie sat next to her. Parting her hair, she inspected her face and, just like that, asked about it. What could she say to enchant this girl? She leaned into her ear—so pale she could see the blue and red lattice as delicate as the crazing in her family’s finest Imari china—and whispered that it was her father who’d done it. Flayed open her face with ice skates.
She never forgot Marjorie, or the lie, and became ill when her cherished friend transferred to another school in another part of the country, where her diplomatic father was reassigned.
Years later she believed she saw her, though who could be sure? It was 1919, and they were women now, on an entirely different continent, in an entirely different hemisphere, far from the classroom in Niigata. It was a glorious day, the California sun invigorating the streets, and as she lifted her face in spontaneous praise of its vitality, she caught another face doing the same. Marjorie! Her mouth shaped the name no longer so difficult to pronounce. But the woman only lowered her gaze and hurried off, the fair crowd swallowing her up.