Читать книгу Garden of Stones - Sophie Littlefield - Страница 8

3

Los Angeles

December 1941

Every day when the noon bell rang, it was the lunch monitor’s job to stand at the front of the class and choose rows of students to line up, the quietest and most attentive first.

The teacher, for whom the ritual had lost some of its appeal over time—understandably, because she was at least a hundred years old—attended to her own tasks: gathering her purse and her lunch in its wicker pail, removing her glasses and placing them in the desk drawer, straightening stacks of papers. Unless the lunch monitor was utterly devoid of any sense of drama, she would drag out the selection, taking her time surveying the rows of eighth graders, and only after building sufficient suspense would she announce her choice.

Row three, you may line up.

And then the process would be repeated until everyone had lined up for lunch.

Each Monday morning, new recess and lunch monitors took up the yoke of duty, the schedule having been posted the first day of school. Lucy had waited more than three months for her turn. She had asked her mother to press her best blouse, the one with the tiny pleated ruffles around the Peter Pan collar. She had worn her favorite headband, the navy velvet with the small folded bow, and new snow-white socks. Lucy looked her best this Monday morning, and because she was Lucy Takeda, that meant she looked splendid indeed.

All through the morning she waited impatiently, forcing herself not to slouch in her seat. At last it was nearly noon. The teacher glanced up at the clock, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucy. She did not smile. Instead she closed her eyes and pinched the flabby skin between her eyebrows, frowning as though she had a headache. Then she opened her planner and ran her finger down the page. “The new hall monitor this week shall be Samuel McGinnis,” she said without inflection. “The new lunch monitor shall be Nancy Marks.”

For a second, Lucy was sure that she had heard wrong, that the teacher had made a mistake. Lucy had certainly not made a mistake—the date had been circled on the calendar at home for months.

Nancy Marks turned in her seat and gawped at Lucy, but she scrambled to her feet when the teacher snapped that she didn’t have all day. It seemed that Nancy’s voice held a note of apology as she chose Lucy’s row to go first, but as the students filed to the front of the room, Nancy did not look at her.

* * *

“It’s because you’re a Jap,” Yvonne Graziano said, not without sympathy. Yvonne and Lucy had been best friends since second grade. They huddled in the corner of the playground under an arbor covered with the canes of climbing roses gone dormant for the winter. Lucy had learned not to stand too close, or her angora coat would get stuck on the thorns.

Yvonne spoke with authority, since her eldest brother was in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at March Field, but Yvonne’s mother was worried that he would be sent to the front lines as soon as the United States entered the war.

“My dad says if there was ever a war with Japan, he’d sign up if they let him,” Lucy said, fighting back tears. She’d managed to stay proud and aloof all through lunch, though she had little appetite for the boiled egg and apple her mother had packed. “He says he’d go fight if he could.”

Yvonne nodded sympathetically. “My dad says your dad is one of the good ones. But he’s too old.”

It was true—Lucy’s father was astonishingly old. His teeth were long and yellow, and his mustache was more silver than black. Behind his shiny round spectacles his eyes—though kind, always kind—were nested in wrinkles.

“But still, he’s as American as anyone else.” On this point Lucy was less certain, because her father still spoke Japanese occasionally. He read the Rafu Shimpo, a newspaper printed only in Japanese, and conducted much of his personal business in the shops along First Street in Little Tokyo. On their anniversary, her father took her mother to dinner at the Empire Hotel; he often brought her flowers wrapped in white paper from Uyehara Florist. Even their church, Christ Community Presbyterian, was mostly filled with Japanese families on Sundays.

Still, Lucy had no doubts about her father’s patriotism. On the Fourth of July he studded the yard with tiny American flags, and he stood proudly for the national anthem at Gilmore Field when he took Lucy to see the Stars play.

Yvonne looked at her sympathetically. “That’s good. But my dad says it’s not going to matter much longer, if Japan keeps invading. He says things are bound to change.”

Yvonne’s words were as chilling as they were vague. Change was unimaginable. Lucy had grown up in the same house her parents lived in before she was born, a white two-story on Clement Street with black shutters and a porch with flowers spilling out of baskets hanging from the eaves, a nicer house than most of her friends lived in. Lucy had always had the same bedroom, the same bathroom with its pink-and-black tile and ruffled curtains in the window. The same walk to school—down Clement to the corner, crossing Normandie, and then three blocks to 156th—since the first day of kindergarten. The only changes in her life were the coverlets her mother made for her bed, the dresses hanging in her closet and the height of the two little twisty-branched trees in the front, which her mother had planted when she and her father were first married. Each year, they grew a few more inches, and Lucy knew that someday the tallest branches would reach the eaves.

Lucy knew that her father was worried too, though he refused to speak of the war while Lucy was in the room; when her parents listened to the radio after dinner, she was sent to her room to study. Of course, she snuck out and listened, anyway. And there were the newspapers: she couldn’t read a single word of the Rafu Shimpo, but the headlines at the newsstand on the way to the market were impossible to miss. Hidden Tank Army Protects Moscow. Seven Vessels Sunk Off Italy. Still, how could the events unfolding in these far-off places possibly affect Lucy and her family a million miles away in California, where even now, in the middle of winter, the air was scented with citrus blossoms?

Two boys kicked a ball past them, coattails flapping. When they saw Lucy and Yvonne, the shorter of the two skidded to a halt. “Thought you were supposed to be lunch monitor this week,” he said, sticking a finger into his ear and scratching vigorously.

Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead, she pretended to rub at a bit of dirt on the lid of her lunch pail.

“Thought you were supposed to be running home to your mama,” Yvonne snapped. “I heard her calling you. She said you wet the bed again.”

Lucy, buoyed by her friend’s loyalty, blinked and smiled shyly. But as the boy ran off and Yvonne linked an arm through hers, Lucy knew that the changes had already started, and nothing in her power could stop them.