And the older a Japanese garden, the more natural it looks, and added years serve only to increase its glories.
– Takeo Shiota
Mas walked through the long plastic strips hanging from the doorway of the grocery store. The Korean shopkeeper was perched on a stool next to the cash register this time. Maybe business was slow this morning, thought Mas.
“Haven’t seen you in a couple of days,” the shopkeeper said as Mas approached the counter.
“I really goin’ home now,” Mas announced, drumming his callused thumbs against the counter’s rubber surface. “Tomorrow.”
“Good to go home.”
Mas nodded.
“Talk to my sister last night. She says it’s seventy degrees over in L.A. ”
“Oh, yah.” It would be good for his muscles and joints to feel the beating of the sun again. Yet a part of Mas was going to miss the coldness. It made him move around more than he ever would, even in spring.
“Marlboro?” The shopkeeper started to reach for a carton of cigarettes, but Mas shook his head. He remembered what Takeo’s doctor had said. You need to cut back or quit altogether, Mr. Arai. Don’t you want to see your grandchild graduate from high school? That was a ridiculous challenge; Mas didn’t even know if he could count that high, but what if he beat the odds, confounded all the handicappers and prognosticators at the local lawn mower shop? Instead he reached for a package of Juicy Fruit gum. A jumbo pack almost as wide as a deck of cards. Seventeen sticks should keep him busy on the plane. And in terms of overdosing on sugar, who cared about that? Since he had no teeth anyway, it didn’t make much difference.
He took out a dollar, but the shopkeeper pushed the money back toward Mas. “Free,” he said. “On the house.”
Mas got on an underground train on his way to the Eighteenth Street station for Joy’s exhibition opening. Lloyd had plotted Mas’s path on both subway and street maps so carefully that Mas thought that each footstep had been calculated. Neither Lloyd nor Mari could make it, because of Takeo, so Mas was supposed to be the Arai-Jensen household representative.
As he sat in the train car, Mas thought about what it was really going to be like when he returned to the house in Altadena. He had spoken to Haruo earlier, updating him on all the news, including the latest, that Larry Pauley had been arrested at the Canadian border. He had been carrying one hundred thousand dollars in cash and was on his way to purchase a Thoroughbred reared in British Columbia.
Haruo had news of his own. “When you get back, there’s sumbody you gotsu to meet,” he said. “Izu gotsu a new friend.”
Mas’s ears perked up. He had heard this tone of voice before. He knew what it was about even before Haruo went further.
“She’s a routeman. You knowsu, buys flowers at the Market and delivers them all ova the place. Sheezu been doin’ dis ever since the fifties.”
A routeman? Must be a big, strong woman, one who could easily toss Haruo from one side of the room to another. But then Haruo was partial to strong women, as all Japanese American men were.
“How’s Tug doin’?” Haruo had asked.
Sitting in the train car on his way to the art gallery, Mas honestly wasn’t sure. Tug had said some strange things last night, that Joy would never get married and have children like Mari. How do you know? Mas had asked him. Joy still young. Has time. But Tug had just nodded his head sadly, saying that it wasn’t in the cards for her.
Mas ended up at the gallery a little late-he had taken a couple of wrong turns, in spite of Lloyd’s detailed maps-and sure enough, there was Tug, wearing a light-blue suit and a red and blue striped tie. With all the cigarette smoke from the young people waiting outside, Tug looked like he was emerging from a mist from the heavens.
“Sorry Izu late,” Mas apologized.
“No problem,” Tug said, opening the gallery’s glass door.
The pervading color was black, which made Mas feel that he was at a funeral reception. He thought that he had seen a flash of red in a corner, but that was actually a windowpane lit up from the back. As he got closer, he noticed that red raindrops bled down the glass. The artwork was aptly labeled, Blood Rain. Mas, who had seen enough blood on this trip, moved to a ceramic hot dog and bun the size of a small sports car, and then a mound of trash, complete with sanitary napkins and empty beer cans.
“Whatsa point?” he asked Tug about the trash installation. “Dis on every street corner.”
“The guy’s famous, I guess.” Tug read the label. “Selling for three thousand.”
Three thousand? Could pay one third of my new credit card bill. Mas imagined throwing down fresh grass cuttings and a rusty Pennsylvania push lawn mower. How much would these thin hakujin pay for that?
More black clothes, but no sign of Joy. There was an African American woman with a huge wrapped yellow headdress the size of a beehive. And a hakujin woman dressed in an old black kimono cinched at the waist with a piece of dyed blue fabric. Mas grimaced. Although this woman maybe didn’t know any better, the kimono she was wearing was strictly reserved for men and for funerals. And the belt was furoshiki, a piece of cloth that Chizuko had used to wrap around bamboo containers of musubi, rice balls wrapped in black seaweed. When Mas brought that to Tug’s attention, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t matter, Mas,” Tug said. “This is America.”
Besides Mas and Tug, there was another Asian face-a young woman wearing a pair of monpe pants, the pantaloons, cut at the calves, that Japanese peasants wore in the rice paddies. But instead of straw zori slippers, the woman wore military boots, not that different from the ones Tug had probably had in Europe. Mas feared that Tug was going to try to make conversation with the girl. She must have sensed it, too, because she disappeared in the crowd of black as soon as Tug made eye contact.
Waiters came around often, offering glasses of wine and strange appetizers. As usual, Tug declined the wine, with Mas accepting each one of Tug’s rejects. The same went for the Ritz crackers topped with caviar, sour cream, and avocado. Who would have known such a strange concoction to taste so good?
“Wherezu Joy?” Mas asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tug. His military-trained eyes surveyed the crowd, searching, searching.
The two friends finally landed up in a corner, surrounded by X-rays illuminated by metal light boxes.
“This reminds me of Dr. Hayakawa’s office,” Tug said, referring to a gastrointestinal specialist in Pasadena who had yanked out Tug’s gallbladder last year.
While doctors’ offices always made Mas feel cold and alone, this X-ray gallery felt warm, like a line of fireplaces glowing from the middle of the wall. The X-rays were cut up and brightly colored in fluorescent paint. One light box held a montage of head X-rays, with a negative of a girl in the center.
Mas lowered his reading glasses from his head to his nose. In the photo negative, the girl’s teeth were black, the pupils of the sloping eyes white.
“Who’s dis?” Mas asked.
“It’s Joy.”
One light box after another reflected parts of Joy’s life. X-rays of broken arms, a teenage Joy playing basketball. X-rays of a fractured leg, Joy on the steps of the Medical University of South Carolina. Mas couldn’t look at Tug’s face. He didn’t understand what the X-rays meant and wasn’t sure that he even wanted to.
Apart from the light boxes, there was another feature in Joy’s exhibition. A metal contraption that attracted more people in black to wait in line to peer inside.
“Dat part of it?” Mas asked.
Tug examined the side of the machine. He explained that it was an old-time Mutoscope, similar to ones set up in the penny arcade on Disneyland ’s Main Street. By cranking the side handle of the scope, you could flip through a series of cards, creating a moving picture. A movie screening for a private party of one.
Tug and Mas stood in line behind the African American woman in the beehive headdress. After she was through, she turned and looked over Mas’s head to smile at Tug. “Wonderful, just wonderful,” she said, readjusting her makeshift hat and turning her attention to the wall of trash.
“Go ahead, Mas.”
“No, you go,” Mas insisted. It was Tug’s daughter, after all. They continued like this for a couple more rounds until it dawned on Mas that Tug was afraid. He needed a friend to be the guinea pig viewer.
Mas took a deep breath and then pressed his face against a viewer shaped like an underwater diving mask. He cranked the handle and saw Tug as a boy on the chili pepper farm with his four oldest brothers and sisters. The old photograph was black-and-white, and then suddenly his overalls were colored a bright blue, the chili peppers green and red. Then the static figures became an animated cartoon, the chili peppers thrown in the air and then segueing to an image of Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the landmark peak within the internment camp. Smoking like a volcano, Heart Mountain erupted, spreading thick red and black lava, which carried a photo of Tug in his Army uniform. Lil appeared, so pristine in a white cotton blouse and her hair permed and curled close to her face. In the background was her barrack in Arkansas, a tar-paper shack that transformed into a giant jaguar. Didn’t make sense, but Mas kept cranking. And finally there was Tug again, wearing one of Lil’s full-length aprons and holding one of their carving knives. Lil was next to him, her hands on his shoulder. Thanksgiving dinner, about five years ago, judging from the style of Lil’s eyeglass frames. Suddenly they moved, no more apron or knife, no more turkey. They were ballroom dancing, something Mas wouldn’t dare to do. The dancing couple dissolved into two smiles fluttering like butterflies. Then blank. Mas continued cranking, and the movie returned to the chili pepper farm.
He let go of the machine’s crank and stood up straight. “Nice,” he said. “Real nice.” Tug hesitated and then leaned down to the scope. He was cranking like a madman; he must have viewed the movie two times straight. Mas didn’t know what the short film meant, but somehow it made him feel happy. And on this trip, you had to grab at any kind of remnants of happiness.
The person behind them began to cough, and even Tug realized that his time was up. He removed his face from the viewer. The line had gotten longer, at least fifteen people deep, but Tug had to experience an encore and went toward the end of the line.
“I wait here,” Mas said, opting for another glass of wine by a display of a basketball covered with Barbie doll heads.
Tug was third in line when a familiar voice called out a few feet away: “Dad.” Surrounded by four women, Joy stood by the broken-arm X-ray light box. Circles of her two braids-one hot pink, the other blue-were pinned to the sides of her head. She wore a shimmering light-blue dress with a plunging neckline held together by a circular brooch.
“Hey, we match,” she said, laughing and pointing to her father’s light-blue suit, his tie, and even his round Optimist Club tiepin. Tug got out of line to talk to Joy, but then a group in black walked in between them. Taking another drink of his wine, Mas watched as Tug desperately tried to make his way to his daughter’s side.
When Mas walked into the apartment, his face hot and stoplight red from the successive glasses of alcohol, he was enveloped by a wonderful aroma from a pot boiling on the stove.
“Whatchu making?” he asked Mari, whose hands were stuffed in oven mitts.
“Corned beef and cabbage. Lloyd’s favorite.”
“No, that’s your favorite,” Lloyd said. Mas had to agree. Every St. Patrick’s Day, they had gone to the Japanese Catholic church just east of Little Tokyo to eat corned beef, cabbage, and sticky rice in Styrofoam bowls on plastic trays outside on tables covered with butcher paper. They had gone at the invitation of friends, but soon it was a tradition that Mari insisted on every year.
Chizuko also made her version throughout the winter, long, peeled carrots floating alongside a slab of red meat and cabbage. One year, Mari had gotten her tonsils removed, and seemed content eating her special diet of 7-Up and ice cream-that is, until she saw the steaming pot of her favorite food and burst into tears.
“Rememba after you got your tonsils out-”
“Oh, yeah.” Mari smiled, lifting the meat and vegetables with a pair of tongs. “I can’t believe you’d remember that. I was only about six years old.”
For a moment, Mas felt normal. The corned beef was tender, falling apart in his mouth without much effort of his dentures. They laughed, the noise and the scents filling the corners of the underground apartment. Takeo was safe in his crib, sleeping, hopefully not being terrorized by any nightmares.
After their early dinner, Lloyd insisted that Mari go to the gathering at the Teddy Bear Garden, the community garden trapped in an enclosed triangle.
“Get out of the house. Breathe in fresh air. It’s just a few blocks away.”
Mari was still wary about leaving Takeo, who was now awake and lying on a blanket on the floor. “Well, I’ll at least change his diaper before I go,” she said.
“No, Mari, I can handle it. You just go.”
“Izu help Lloyd,” Mas added.
Mas knew the drill now from babysitting Takeo. Fresh diaper-disposable paper ones with stickers, not cloth and safety pins like in Mari’s baby days. Take off the dirty diaper and clean oshiri. Lloyd pulled up Takeo’s legs and wiped his bare butt with a Wet One.
“ Ara- ” Mas pointed to the blue-black mark above Takeo’s behind. He hadn’t noticed that before.
“Yeah,” said Lloyd. “I guess he’s more Japanese than hakujin.”
The bald man, the night gardener, remembered Mas as he and Mari approached the gate of the Teddy Bear Garden. “Yes, the gardener from California,” the man said.
“My father,” explained Mari.
“I had no idea. Well, welcome to the family. Have something to eat, something to drink.”
They stood in line, holding small empty paper plates and napkins. Mari seemed to know most of the people, and Mas recognized a few of them from the blood drive at the hospital. They ate chocolate cake on a damp bench, and Mas could sense that Mari, her eyes darting back and forth at the crowd by the barbecue, wanted to make more conversation with her friends, yet stayed behind with him.
“You pack everything?” she asked.
“Yah.” There wasn’t much to pack. Lloyd had gone over to the Laundromat and washed Mas’s underwear, socks, jeans, and long-sleeved shirt. All that was rolled up and pushed into the hard plastic shell of the yellow Samsonite.
“Who’s going to pick you up from the airport?”
“Haruo.” Mas wasn’t looking forward to all the stories he would have to listen to on the hour’s drive back to Altadena.
“It’s good that Haruo’s there for you, Dad.”
“Um,” Mas grunted. He stacked Mari’s finished plate on top of his and made his way to the garbage can a few steps away. He passed a couple of women who didn’t look like the rest of the crowd. Instead of jeans and knit scarves, they wore pressed slacks and gold jewelry.
“Who’s that?” he heard one woman ask the other.
“Oh, he’s connected with the Waxley House. He’s their little Takeo Shiota,” one of the women said.
Mas bared his top dentures. He wanted to snap at the women, but he would never dare to do so. He turned toward the bench, and there was Mari, her head tilted back, a small green sycamore leaf in her hands. Her mouth was wide-open, the short staccato of laughter starting to ring from her throat. It sounded somewhat familiar to Mas, yet different, like an old tune that was made new again.