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  She needed this drink; she’d needed it all night. As the bartender filled the glass, she watched with anticipation, and just as she reached out to receive the mug, she felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder.

  “The drink’s on me,” announced a big, happy voice from behind her. She turned around: Rebecca.

  “Hey,” Jackie said, smiling, genuinely happy to see her friend. She had to yell to be heard over the music. “How you doing?”

  “Great.” Rebecca tossed a five on the bar, telling the bartender with a little smile to go ahead and keep the change. Then she turned to Jackie and gave her a different kind of smile. “What are you doing out? Don’t you know that law school students aren’t supposed to have any fun?”

  “Well, I’m not having fun yet. And you’re a law school student, too.”

  “Yeah, much to the law school’s horror.”

  Jackie smiled. It was true that some of the faculty were less than thrilled with Rebecca Nakanishi. In the hallowed halls of the law school, where even the liberal students wore ironed pants and buttoned-down shirts, Rebecca stuck out like a drag queen at a Rotary Club meeting. She was irreverent, colorful, and disrespectful of convention, but she was brilliant—third in her class. She stood there now, one foot on the rung of a stool, waving her hair and conscious of the eyes that watched her. She wore Levi’s, loosefitting, which made you wonder at the shape of the legs inside, and a low-cut tank top, black. Jackie noticed the fluid muscles of her arms, the strength and vulnerability of her collarbone.

  “I had another interview yesterday,” Rebecca shouted. “With Legal Aid, in Westlake.”

  “How’d it go?”

  Rebecca rolled her eyes and launched into a loud monologue of complaint. It was a bad time to be doing public interest, she said—no one in the public had any interest. And the field she wanted to go into—immigrant health—was especially tough, since no one in California seemed to give a shit about immigrants, except for thinking of better ways to keep them out. Legal Aid was doing the best they could, but they only had sure funding for two lawyers, and weren’t certain they could take on another. “So who knows?” she concluded. “Maybe I’ll just end up at a firm, like you. Maybe this isn’t the time to try and save people.”

  Jackie teetered on the edge between guilt and annoyance— she always felt a bit accused, a bit defensive, about Rebecca’s commitment to public interest law, when she herself was on track for corporate riches.

  Rebecca took a sip of her drink, a gin and tonic. “Speaking of saving people, where’s your Other?”

  Jackie took a gulp of her beer. “Home. Alone. Depressed.”

  “What a surprise. You know, I was talking to Albert Stevens the other day and he told me that your last two girlfriends at Berkeley were just like Laura. What’s the deal with you, anyway? You’re like a reverse missionary. Rescuing the lost white children.”

  Jackie smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, somebody’s got to.”

  “So what’s the occasion for her sadness today? She break a fingernail?”

  “Shut up. No. We went over to her mom’s place for dinner, and her big bad older sister was there.”

  “Her mom’s cool with you though, right?”

  “Very cool.”

  “Good. Maybe she could tell your parents about your deviant sexual practices.”

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to.” Rebecca grinned.

  Jackie shook her head. “Be fair. It isn’t that simple. It’s not just that I don’t want to tell them I’m gay. My parents don’t want to talk about anything.” It was true. Jackie’s parents lived with the luxury of an innocence that Jackie didn’t totally believe in. She’d taken Laura home or out to family dinners, and her parents had accepted Laura’s presence without question. Jackie wasn’t sure whether this acceptance meant her parents knew what Laura was to her and were all right with it—like Lois; Lois always asked after Laura, and invited her to things—or that they simply had no idea. When she was in high school, they’d remarked sometimes on the intensity of particular friendships, but after a certain point, the remarks and questions had stopped. Laura didn’t understand why Jackie didn’t just tell her parents, since everybody, everybody (including them, she said) knew. And Jackie couldn’t explain to her that she didn’t tell her parents about her sexuality for the same reason they never asked her: If she told them, it would be out there, and then they would have to talk. And considering how poorly they all did discussing anything of substance, she couldn’t imagine how her parents would deal with this. “I mean, come on,” she said, half-pleading. “You know how it is with a Japanese family.”

  Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so now you’re Japanese?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Rebecca replied. “Anyway, Laura. Does she know you came to this lesbian lair without her?”

  But Jackie was still stuck on her friend’s last comment, and couldn’t answer right away. She didn’t really know what Rebecca was referring to, but she suspected that it had to do with Laura, and with the place where she grew up, and with the fact that, except for Rebecca herself, Jackie didn’t really have Asian friends. “Yeah,” Jackie said, finally. “She trusts me. She knows I won’t pick anyone up.”

  Rebecca laughed. “Yeah, you’re kind of boring that way.”

  Jackie raised her eyebrows. “Look who’s talking. When’s the last time you took anyone home?”

  “Touché. I’ve been celibate for so long I can’t even find my own twat anymore. Not that I’ve ever been into the bar scene.” She looked troubled for a moment, and Jackie leaned in closer.

  “What?”

  “Well, I did go out on a few dates a while back, with this med school student from Hawaii.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. And I mean, girl. Eyebrow waxing and manicures and shit.”

  “So what happened?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “She vanished. Stopped calling. Presto. Gone.”

  “Wow,” said Jackie, standing up straight again. “You mean there’s actually someone who doesn’t want to sleep with you?”

  Rebecca looked at her dismissively. “What are you talking about? There’s plenty of people who don’t want to sleep with me. Heather doesn’t,” she said, indicating a woman behind them who they both vaguely knew. She turned back to Jackie. “You don’t.”

  She looked at Jackie and smiled, and Jackie looked away. She didn’t want to sleep with Rebecca—she wasn’t really attracted to her—but there was something between them, a challenge or a question. She was suddenly even more glad that Laura hadn’t come along—Laura didn’t like Rebecca and was threatened by her. Jackie assured her that there was no reason to be—she’d never go for Rebecca, girlfriend or not, despite, or maybe because of (as Laura said) “the things they had in common.” It wasn’t that she didn’t find her friend attractive or appealing. But Rebecca was half-Japanese, and despite her green almond-shaped eyes and wavy brown hair, she looked Asian enough to turn Jackie off; to make Jackie think of her as a mirror she didn’t want to look into. Kissing Rebecca would be like kissing a sister, if she had one—unerotic, strange, slightly creepy. But it was more than that. Rebecca, with her brains, her looks, and above all, her panache, made Jackie feel stiff and boring in comparison. Jackie wasn’t used to feeling inadequate, and it occurred to her, suddenly, that part of what she got out of being with Laura was that she felt so strong and able in contrast.

  A table opened up behind them, and Jackie and Rebecca sat down. After the brief moment of discomfort at the bar, they smoothed down to normal again, gossiping about the students they knew, complaining about school, checking out the women who passed by. Jackie contemplated telling Rebecca about Curtis Martindale and Lanier, then decided against it, for now. Things were easy between them. Rebecca had come with a couple who didn’t leave the dance floor all night, and she seemed as happy as Jackie to have found someone to talk to.
They had a few more drinks and watched the happenings in the bar. Rebecca kept up a running commentary on this woman’s hairdo, on that woman’s jeans, on the other woman’s girlfriend flirting too eagerly with the DJ, and had Jackie laughing as she hadn’t laughed in weeks. Jackie felt the difficulties of the evening receding, the memories of Laura’s misery lifting off of her. She wondered, for a moment, what it would be like if she could do this all the time—go out, not while leaving her girlfriend at home, but not having a girlfriend at all. She liked the feeling of sitting at a table, with good beer and good company, having nobody’s tears to go home to.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FRANK, 1942–1948

  DURING THE last week of April, 1942, the Japanese of Los Angeles awoke to find that evacuation orders had sprouted, overnight, from trees and poles all over the city. They had a week, the orders said, to prepare for their departure; they were being moved inland, away from the coast. All over L.A.—all over the coast—Issei and Nissei rushed frantically around their homes and neighborhoods. They didn’t know if they were coming back, so they had to get rid of everything. Houses and farms were sold to white men wearing soft felt hats and hard smirks. Furniture, and boxes of books, dishes, plants, clothing, were dragged out to front lawns for emergency sales. Some neighborhoods were so choked with beds and tables and clothes that it looked like Japanese America was simply moving outside. Old photographs and letters from Japan, paintings, records, kimonos—anything with a whiff of Japanese about it—were burned or buried, so no arrogant young soldier who’d just started to shave could come and claim they were in league with the enemy.

  Frank’s father wasn’t there to see his family depart. The night after Pearl Harbor, as the Sakais were burning pictures in a trash bin near the shed, three large hakujin in dark suits appeared at their door. Frank was never sure whether they were from the police, or the state, or the FBI. They led Kazuo into the kitchen and asked him many questions—none of which made any sense to Frank, who was listening from outside the door. Do you know so and so, what were you doing on such and such a night, isn’t your gambling group really a cover for strategic war meetings? Then they took him away—largely, it seemed, because two of the men he gambled with were Junichi Murau, the head of a Japanese-language school, and Minoru Kanazawa, vice president of the Vegetable Growers Association. Frank stayed up all night, sitting with his dumbstruck mother. The next morning, she made a round of phone calls and discovered that Steve Yamamoto’s father and David Hara’s father had also been arrested. No one knew where they’d been taken. Over the next several months, the remaining Sakais received two letters from Kazuo—one from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the other from Camp Livingston, Louisiana. They were written in English, which Frank found strange, but then he realized his father had been forced to write in English, for the censors. Even so, the letters had large sections blacked out of them, or cut out all together. Frank gleaned only that his father missed them, and that he didn’t like the food he was served.

  The Sakais spent the winter and spring of ’42 in a strange, suspended limbo, mother working, children going to school, thinking of their father every day. Frank had been going out that summer and fall with Victor, frequenting the jazz clubs over on Central, but they stopped now, for Frank’s safety, and because of the blackouts. Every evening, Frank and Kumiko did their homework by candlelight while their mother cracked open the curtains and looked out at the street. When they awoke on New Year’s Day to find the city covered with snow—enough for Frank and Victor to make wet, sloppy snowballs and slip and slide on the white-slick sidewalks—Masako mumbled and prayed, certain that the first snowfall she’d seen in America did not bode well for her family. The L.A Times and the radio newsmen warned that the Japs were going to parachute into the streets and engage in face-to-face combat; Mayor Bowron snarled that each of the little so-called American Japs in the city would know his part in the coming invasions; the Chinese and Koreans took to wearing red, white, and blue buttons to distinguish themselves from the enemy. The Sakais caught people’s glances in the hallways and on the streets. It seemed to them that this fear and hatred was like a huge, invisible cobra that was slowly encircling them, poised over them, waiting to strike. When the rumor, and then the order, of evacuation came, Frank felt beneath his anger some parcel of relief. At least now there was an answer, a conclusion.

  Frank’s mother didn’t know how long they were going, or if they’d return, but she refused to sell the piece of land that she and Kazuo had struggled for so many years to buy. Even after they’d had enough money (pieced together from their harvesting earnings, plus money lent by the pooled fund from their kenjinkai), they’d had to wait until Frank was born—because of laws barring Issei from owning property—so they could place the new land in his name. And it was Frank, finally, who arranged for someone to watch over it while they were away—his best friend from school, Victor Conway. The day before they were supposed to leave, the Sakais arrived home from buying underwear and socks to find several of Frank’s friends and their parents assembled on the lawn.

  “What are you doing here?” Frank asked Victor, who came down the walkway to greet them.

  “We figured you could use some stuff out there in the desert.”

  Frank looked around at his friends, noticing for the first time that they’d all come bearing something. Victor and his mother brought two heavy coats that their father still had from World War I. Barry Hughes and his family, who were originally from Cleveland, brought heavy sweaters for everyone, including Kazuo. Old Man Larabie brought some canned fruit and the wool socks his wife had knitted. Andy Riley, the white boy from Boston, brought three pairs of long underwear. The Conways also brought a basket of fried chicken for the next day’s journey, and Victor presented Frank with a football. Finally, Old Man Larabie’s wife unwrapped a huge chocolate cake, which everyone ate inside off paper plates from Larabie’s store, since the dishes had all been packed away or sold. Masako, who didn’t know her son’s friends very well, was completely overwhelmed by their kindness. Although she had not shed a tear in front of her children through the imprisonment of her husband; through the rumors of internment; through the selling of their car and possessions, now she sat crying in the one remaining chair and refused to take her hands from her eyes. Kumiko, whose own friends had quietly been supplying her with magazines and make-up (no stockings, though, since nylon was needed for parachutes), tried in vain to comfort her. After an hour or so, people started to leave, hugging Frank and his family and wishing them luck, and Frank tried not to wonder if he’d ever see them again. When everyone else had left and Victor got up to go, he and Frank faced each other, lower lips trembling.

  “You watch your back now,” Victor instructed. For the next three and a half years, he would remove the trash that was dumped on the Sakais’ wilted lawn; board up the holes left by bricks and rocks that people heaved through the windows; check the house every month, even after he’d moved to Watts, to make sure no one had taken up residence inside.

  “I’ll try,” Frank said. “And you watch yours, my brother.”

  The Sakais spent six weeks at the Santa Anita racetrack, living in the stalls that had been emptied of horses to make room for this different brand of livestock. Then they were taken to Manzanar in the height of the summer, on a day so choked with dust that when the guard pointed toward what he said were their quarters, Frank thought he was directing them into the desert. They shared their room with a family of five, the space divided by a string of blankets, but they knew they were luckier than most. Their room was on an end, and when Frank went to sleep on his cot near the wall, hay in his mattress rustling as he turned, he heard not voices on the other side of the thin tar paper, but the wind—whistling between the barracks, rattling the trees, weaving and howling through the mountains. The wind slipped under the barracks too, and up through wide gaps in the floorboards he could thrust his hands into. Frank didn’t think about this, though; he simply tried to get th
rough his days. His sister, who was enjoying the freedom and proximity of so many young people, made a new set of friends in the camp high school and spent most of her time away from their room.

  Masako worked in the camp mess hall, and at seven she returned with left-over eggs and stale bread, sometimes only slightly spoiled fruit, so that her family would not have to eat the runny piles of gray, limp slabs of brown she prepared for everyone else. This saved Frank and Kumiko from having to stand in line at the mess hall, although there were still lines for everything else—the bathroom, the shower, their mail. The food—the bologna, the canned spinach, the bug-seasoned oatmeal—would get worse, and the portions smaller, the longer they stayed.

  The heat Frank could handle; it was a dry heat, unoppressive. But the wind and dust he couldn’t get away from. The wind pressed the dust into every crack of skin, every fold of his clothing; he nailed soup can lids against the holes in the wall in order to keep it out. When the winter came, sudden and harsh as judgment, everything got worse. The wind relinquished its dust in the winter, and instead blew snow and pieces of ice against the side of the barracks. The ice hit hard, a freezing assault, and when Frank opened the door, the cold air slapped his face; the wind sucked the water from his eyes. Frank’s mother stuffed rolled paper into the door frame to shut out the air, but the cold still rose from the ground. At night, Frank lay huddled and shivering under his green army blanket, while the voices of the young ones on the other side of the room all rose in a chorus of complaint.