What You Say I Say Again
Christian Michener
Until I was 17 and she came home, Aunt Janice was little more than a name, a character constructed from her letters from Lanai and my parents’ occasional stories. I recall only one photograph of her, standing wrapped in what looked like a blue cellophane jacket and pants, her face hidden underneath a hat resembling the conical basket where we kept rolled up towels in the downstairs bathroom. Ochi and I. June was the entire caption.
“Your Aunt Janice picks pineapples,” my mother said.
“How many pineapples can a picker pick if the picker isn’t sick?” my father sang.
“She and Ochi,” my mother said, without looking up from her cross-stitch.
Ochi was Aunt Janice’s husband, a Japanese man she had met when she was stationed as a nurse at Pearl Harbor. Once, at a Christmas party poker game, my Uncle John had proposed that the war had turned Janice’s mind inside out. That was why she had stayed on in Hawaii, abandoning her family and living as a farmhand with a man no one had met or talked to. “War does strange things to people,” Uncle John said.
My father was rearranging his chips, having just won a hand of five-card draw with a pair of jacks. The click of the chips against each other paused, then came in stiff, regular beats, like the clip of a toy plastic horse. My father had been at Guadalcanal. His best friend from high school, Evan Lassiter, had almost been there too. A few weeks earlier Evan had been running up a hillside beside my father, on Tulagi, and then he wasn’t. Twenty seconds of time disappeared from my father’s life. He and Evan had been running, then he was lifting himself off of the ground, and somewhere in the twenty seconds in between Evan Lassiter had vanished. Stretching out to my father’s right was a wash of limbs and entrails and black and vermilion uniforms on the hardened, pitted hillscape. Below him, as if Evan were being sucked back to sea, smoke and steam and sea surf stirred the air above the sand. A marine rushing up behind stepped on my father’s back as he lay looking down the hill. My father stood up and followed. He would soon be moved to Guadalcanal, where four more of his friends would disappear before the battle was over.
“Caring for the wounded would have been a luxury to most people,” my father said.
“Of course,” my Uncle John said. He had been too young to fight, and had only been drafted well after the fall of Berlin. “But she saw some bad things there.”
“People experience bad things too,” my father said. He would not look up. He continued to lift and tap his chips. The only other sound was the ice of someone’s Manhattan as they shook it.
“Let’s have another hand,” someone finally said.
But if not the war, what else would explain Aunt Janice? She had received her nursing degree, which is how she ended up at Pearl Harbor, but afterwards, stunned by the stench of the burning oil of December 7, by the flesh that peeled like charred pastry off the skin of the sailors, by what she saw in the blank eyes of those who rolled back across the Pacific, she joined Ochi—we knew him by no other name—after the war in the exhausting work along the long, leisurely green rows of the pineapple fields of Lanai. The difference from what the rest of us did—plugging in our Christmas lights in Hoboken each December, getting degrees from Fordham and Rutgers and Siena, watching the highways lace together the country, knotting up our ties or our aprons—made us imagine that Janice had simply lost her bearings the way the world itself had during the war. Ochi’s family got paid for how much they planted and how much they picked, and the family worked together, like a small corporation. Only Ochi, once a plantation foreman, spoke any English, and that very little—after the war, he spoke none at all. He had met Janice at a reception for local dignitaries several months before December 7. The plantation owner for whom he worked brought him along to help translate, imagining—wrongly—that the simple commands Ochi gave in English in the fields signaled a broader skill in the language. Janice had gone as a colonel’s escort. He introduced her only as Miss Wallace, and pointed repeatedly to the table of punch and fruit where most of the other women huddled in their own groups of startled uncertainty. She had started a conversation with Ochi, unaware he was not one of the honored guests.
“I am not here to talk,” Ochi said stiffly, struggling to make himself understood.
Janice stared at him. Did he think her not good enough to speak to?
He saw her look and tried to explain himself. “What you say I say again to everybody,” he said.
Was he warning her that he would share all her secrets and gossip? How could he consider her, a lady nurse, responsible for the tension between their countries? Later in the evening Ochi came over and managed to explain what he had meant—that he was nobody important, that he was only there to help translate.
But there was little he or anyone else could do to ease the tension in the room. In two months’ time the punch and the fruit would be remembered with nostalgia and shame.
During Janice’s years in Hawaii, six months would pass without a word from her, and then four letters might arrive within two weeks. They could be a short paragraph, or several pages of looping script. Some were mere lists of what she had done, others inscrutable meditations on ideas about justice or nature or communism. One was accompanied in a box by a pineapple, smuggled past customs, the “very last one of the season,” according to her letter. When we tried to cut it, its juicy innards exploded across the kitchen table like a burst vein.
No one had gone to her wedding, a traditional Shinto ceremony in a shrine whose red carpet bore the mottled stains of the rain that fell through a roof that limited supplies had kept from being repaired. “Shouldn’t we go?” my mother asked my father. “She’s your only sister.”
“Which makes it even worse,” my father said. We all knew what he meant—that she was marrying a Japanese man. My father tried, but he couldn’t control the quick twitch of his shoulders when he would pass a Japanese man on the sidewalk, and he would turn the channel when they spoke on the evening news in the 90s about the rising sun of the Japanese economy. These were the people who had removed Evan Lassiter from the world. Still, with a week to go before the ceremony, he sent his sister a crystal bowl engraved with the skyline of New York as it might appear if it were wrapped in a circle, the Statue of Liberty peering across the open space of the glass at the Empire State Building.
After Ochi died in the late 60s, Janice’s letters, though still frequent, began to express a vague dread about living her life so far from her roots with only her in-laws and the friends she had made there. In her strange, baroque language, which seemed to be her translating herself back into her own native English, she spoke about her life and what she wanted to do. I thought by marriage Ochi’s blood had mingled with mine so deeply that I was now of his family also—see, it’s still his, not our—but alas, I feel the thinness of that blood, or the thinness of that which we shared, that can only seep away in time.
“Why can’t she talk like a normal person?” my father asked. “‘Alas.’ What the hell is that? Just come back home. She should have done it 20 years ago.”
“She needs a reason,” my mother said.
“A reason?” my father asked. “A reason for what?”
My mother didn’t answer, but the reason came on its own. Janice’s mother—my father’s mother, and Uncle John’s—had collapsed twice within a month, the second time from a stroke that left her uncertain on her feet, and it would do everyone good if Janice could move in with her. My grandmother almost welcomed her own dying if it meant getting Janice back for the last years of her life. My father had never been able to bring himself to meet Ochi, but he agreed that the idea of having Janice return was wonderful for everyone. Besides, my mother wrote to Janice, encouraging her return, you can always return to Hawaii if you do not like it here.
Please come get me, Janice wrote back. I don’t have the strength to do it myself.
“What the hell?” my father said.
My mother boarded a jet in Newark, her first flight. She claimed not to be scared, and perhaps did not think she was, but as the jet leaned into the sky her body felt hollowed and her skin cooled under a fine layer of sweat. Over the plains of Illinois and Missouri and Kansas she could not help thinking about what it must have felt like when her high school boyfriend, a year younger than her husband, took to the dark skies outside of Attlebridge, one of which would be his last flight. She had always felt ashamed of her husband’s hatred for the Japanese after the war, but aboard the flight to Los Angeles, she wondered what it must be like to have others want to kill you. She imagined outside her window, above the surf of the clouds, the black and gray puffs of smoke she had seen in the newsreels and movies of the flak the approaching Allies dodged on their bombing missions. She imagined their perverse beauty, like black flowers, the punch of their explosions, and felt the sickening emptiness in her gut as the thump and whompf of the shells punctuated the drone of the propellers. Where had such thoughts come from? Maybe from seeing her husband, hunched over a watery Scotch each evening in the dark family room, his memories of the war playing out before him in the corners of his mind. Around her the flak erupted, the plane shook, the sky sucked them down, seaward. About an hour into the flight my mother dipped into her purse for the small bottle of whiskey my father had told her he had snuck into her purse, and she nursed the tiny bottle, lick by lick, all the way through to Los Angeles, and then onto the red DC-9 of Hawaiian Airlines that would take her on to the islands.
When my mother arrived at Aunt Janice’s house, one of five cottages inhabited by Ochi’s extended family, she was told that Janice was out working in the pineapple fields. It was summer, time for harvesting, and Janice could not sit idly by herself waiting for my mother, thinking about her decision to leave the land and the life to which she had dedicated herself for the last seventeen years. The fields were dotted with the motions of the pickers, blue and red and white flowers bobbing on a sea of green and brown. The locals and migrants and students flown over from the other islands were all buried deep inside their clothes and goggles and hats so that it was impossible for my mother to distinguish her sister-in-law, whom she hadn’t seen since high school, from the rest of those working the fields. Three or four times she was directed to the wrong group of pickers. My mother wore the same white and light blue skirt she had put on before boarding in Newark and had to weave her way carefully along the rows to avoid the sharp edges of the pineapple leaves. The flak waiting beyond Attlebridge was far distant, dispersed by a blue sky and suffused light she had never walked through in Hoboken. Finally she was directed to Janice, who saw her approaching but kept working until my mother stopped confusedly amid all the workers who had stood up from their picking as she approached. At last Janice swung off her hat and scarf, and my mother saw how, despite the long years of working outside, Janice had aged far less than my mother had herself. “I’m packed,” Janice said by way of hello. “I couldn’t sit still.”
The shift from Hoboken to an imaginary Attlebridge to Honolulu to this woman whom my mother hadn’t seen since they passed each other unremarkably in the same high school hallways two decades earlier was too much. She felt dizzy with dislocation. Were there really such places where reddish dirt was sliced in symmetrical rows of sharp, gator-toothed leaves? Did a member of her husband’s family really leave Hoboken to make a life here? Had there really been black spikes that rattled the metal of airplanes, cold and doomed, over the English Sea, and sent her boyfriend into its depths? She sat down in the dirt, in her clean skirt, too faint to stand.
My brothers remember our weeks at Aunt Janice’s—at our grandmother’s, for the year longer she lived after Janice returned, at which point Janice stayed on—as a special thrill, our version of a vacation. They were younger than me. I was almost out of high school by the time Janice returned, and I didn’t understand what all the effort of packing the three of us up to go across town for a week was about. But I didn’t mind. I had friends but none from whom a week away would send me into the doldrums. There was, alas, no boyfriend to keep me up at night dreaming panicked dreams. My father’s gloom wore me down, as did my mother’s fine disregard for it. Whatever empathy and terror and thrill she had discovered in her descent through imaginary fire over Kansas City had dissipated like the dark grey smoke of those visions. She ironed, she drank her g&t’s, she snapped the lids to the lunchboxes closed each morning with satisfaction.
Janice had no television, which drove my brothers crazy, but somehow the days at her house passed quickly, in a series of adventures that supplied Luke and Daniel with lunchroom laughs for all of September when school would resume. Each year we would tell our parents what had happened—the three feral cats who ran into the basement and soon turned on each other until one of them was dead; the effort we made to stay up the entire night by drinking, on the hour, one cup of black coffee; the week we decided to follow a trail of streets through Hoboken so that our passage marked on a map spelled out our names—and each year they would look at each other and decide it wouldn’t be right to send us back, though they always did. Later in life, in trying to explain to my husband what these escapades with Janice were like, I realized that they all started as one thing and ended as another: building a bird feeder, which brought on the cats, became a terrifying testimony to nature red in tooth and claw, in grandma’s basement; a walk to the ice cream store, for which Janice insisted we needed the map, became a pointless, obsessive contest to scrawl our names across the city.
One summer we found ourselves in the midst of a civil war between Janice and her neighbors, the Proszeks. A crab apple tree that had long drooped its head from the back corner of my grandmother’s yard had finally managed to coax itself over the fence that separated Janice’s yard from the Proszeks’. In time, of course, it did what crab apple trees do: drop its sodden apples in the yard. The Proszeks took issue with this, first with small complaints, then with formal requests, and finally with a chain saw. They cut each branch off at the imaginary line above the wooden fence that separated their two yards, so that the tree resembled a large backward P, or a young girl dragging her hair in the wind. They tossed the branches that they had cut over the fence into Janice’s yard. She was staring out her kitchen window at the amputated tree when I walked up beside her. She wore a fancy button-up blouse and jeans tucked inside cowboy boots and three times lifted a coffee cup to her lips without taking a sip. “That tree was there ever since I was a little girl,” Janice said.
“Did the Proszeks do that?”
“I thought I heard a chainsaw last night,” she said. “I should have guessed.”
“Will it die?” I asked.
“Oh, everything dies,” Janice said. She raised the cup to her lips again, and I waited to see if at last she would take a sip. She didn’t. She nodded toward the loose branches, stacked like brittle corpses on the ground, and the dozens of orphaned crab apples surrounding them. “Let’s make jelly,” she said.
My brothers were still living at home when my father moved out. Or up rather, to the room above the garage, which under its peaked ceiling we had fitted out as a kind of storage room and spare bedroom. Visiting cousins had stayed there, braving the space between the garage and house in the early morning to rush to a shower or breakfast, and on occasion my girflfriends and I risked an adventurous sleepover, spying, without success, across the alley at the upper windows of the Turbervilles’. To my brothers, I learned later, the years of my father’s exile passed as images do in a bent mirror: expanding and retracting, distorting reality. They couldn’t quite say when they noticed he was always gone, always in the attic of the garage. The neighbors whispered divorce but it was never that. My parents were not fighting. My father did not hate or grow tired of my mother. There were no other women. There was just a cramped room above a garage, not even carpeted, with a radiator vent that lined the bottom of the walls and pressed upward tongue-drying heat, and there was him, inside that space. To give attention to some questions, as he chose to describe it. I believe Janice gave the words to him—they certainly sounded like her way of talking—though she had no responsibility for his running away. By then he had been let go at his glass company. He had logged enough years for the corporation to label it a retirement, with benefits tagging along behind him. He pretended the annex was a kind of workshop, even purchasing a table saw on which he laid out do-it-yourself instructions he bought in bunches at the hardware store for the complicated scrollwork of a bench back or the top of a pergola gate or milking stool. There were clumps of wood lying about on the saw and the floor, an apocalyptic bestiary of misshapen bodies, sawdust trailing off them like molted hides. “Those are just tests,” he told my mother, when she asked what he was making.
My mother would glance from time to time during the day up at the small window over the garage, behind which my father gave attention to his projects, though none of which, as far as I know, ever found their way to completion. She could never see him through the tiny window and its stubborn glare, and she wondered if he could spy her own movement through the house. The window reminded her of a small door that had been in the basement of her house as a child, inside of which was nothing but a dank and empty triangle of dust and a few rags so rotten as to be part of the dust itself. Each time she was asked to retrieve some potatoes or the laundry or an old bucket from her basement she would hurry past the door as if a troll were crouching there, waiting for the passing of her rushing feet.
When my Aunt Janice died, I of course flew back from Denver for the funeral. My father had died several years before. She would often visit him in his attic, chatting over tea she brought or checking on his woodworking. After we had buried him, I stayed on at my mother’s house for a few days to help clean out his things. Together my mother and I went one morning up into his workshop above the garage. At first there was nothing of surprise there, but as we were leaving my mother gestured to the back corner of the room, near my father’s table saw. “Look at that mess,” she said. Emerging from the corner of the room was a dense layer of sawdust, and scattered pell-mell on top of it were blocks of wood, the cast-offs and leftovers of his experiments. “He was always such a neat person,” my mother said in confusion.
I let her leave the room and start down the stairs before going over to look at the sawdust more closely. I noticed that something had been done to it—moistened, packed down, molded in some way—and that the blocks of wood were shaped, it seemed, with some thought, with curves and appendages like primitive depictions of bodies. Some of the pieces of wood had holes drilled through them. Had all of this just come together by accident, Janice cleaning up while she talked to my father? Or was it what I imagined? A crude diorama of a Pacific beach? I always forgot to ask Janice about it.
They had dressed Janice in a royal navy dress in her coffin, a string of deceptively fake pearls around her neck. It hardly resembled what she wore while alive: capris and halters, caftans and capes, Dallas Cowboys sweatshirts on those rare occasions she’d come to church. Inevitably, at family reunions, she would wear some plaid knickers and a polo, looking all the world like a Scottish golfer. “They should have dressed her in her caftan,” I said to my mother. “Or those red bloomer kind of things she used to wear.” For the funeral I brought a pineapple and put it on the floor next to the casket, and beside it placed a jar of the crab apple jelly, decades old now, that she and I had made when the Proszeks destroyed her tree and I kept as a memento.
My husband stayed home with our three children. None of them had ever known Janice. Maybe I hadn’t either. I never could shake the feeling after we had been together that I had been watching someone act as a caricature of herself. I never could quite figure out what drove her to act as she did, what made her Janice. Uncle John had his theory about the war, that she had been turned inside out, but I wasn’t so sure. How could she leave her mother and brothers behind for seventeen years? Why did she give up nursing to pick pineapples? Why the outrageous outfits? Why did she never talk about her in-laws once she left Hawaii? Unlike my father, who could not escape the ghost of Evan Lassiter and the smoke swirling above the Pacific beaches, my aunt put the past behind her, or at least out of sight of us. She would discuss politics or tell raunchy jokes or humiliate herself by dressing in tattered, foul-smelling clothes and crashing the high school homecoming dance to stir up concern for the homeless. But once she came back to Hoboken she never spoke about her years in Hawaii, her marriage to Ochi, her work on the plantations, her life with her in-laws. Only one time did she let slip a little of that past. She had been watching the news and saw film clips of some horrible tribal atrocities in Africa. She muttered something to herself I couldn’t make out. “What did you say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It was Japanese.”
“What did it mean?”
She took a while to answer, as if considering a good translation. “Only what a crazy world we live in,” she finally said.
I decided not to push her. I learned from my father that you could not push someone to share their secrets. But I regretted not pushing too, finding out more about why she did what she did. Being Janice, she had left the Proszeks two jars of the jelly we had made as a gift on their doorstep. “But they killed your tree,” I said.
Janice shrugged. “It’s what Ochi would want,” she said.
“He must have been a great man,” I said.
Janice waited a long time. I was hoping she would tell me more about him, what attracted her to someone who thought as Ochi did. “If you were so full of hate that you destroyed another person’s tree, and then that person gave you a gift, how would you feel?”
“Horrible,” I said.
Janice smiled. “Exactly,” she said.
Late in her life my mother would realize what should have been obvious: why hadn’t she turned that exhausting trip to Hawaii to collect Aunt Janice into a small vacation? My father had done well as a sales representative for the glass manufacturer he had worked for, but we never took vacations except to go to the shore for a long weekend or to drive up to New York to see the Statue or visit a museum. So after Janice’s family helped my mother from her faint into the farmland dirt, and after a night sleeping in the cottage Janice and Ochi had once shared, she and Janice took a taxi back out of the compound and down the dirt road to, eventually, Honolulu. As they drove away, my mother watched Janice closely, but she did not let Janice see. Her sister-in-law seemed to tremble, but only slightly, and didn’t turn around to watch the house she had lived in for over a decade disappear. In the trunk were three simple brown suitcases. They had been locked since my mother arrived.
My mother and Aunt Janice spent a day in Honolulu waiting for their flight back, but before they left Janice insisted that they take a trip to Sand Island, just inside the harbor. Bunkers and lookout towers were still visible. Two decades before men had stood here and looked out over the Pacific to where their buddies and thousands of others were fighting and suffering and dying. My mother pushed aside the vague stirrings of the flak she had imagined while flying over Kansas. She pushed aside the vision of her own husband out there over the waters as a young man amidst death and of the picture of Evan Lassiter in their high school yearbook.
“Ochi was here,” Janice said.
“When was that?” my mother asked absently.
“During the war. This was an internment camp.”
My mother didn’t ask any more questions, though Janice filled in some of the details, and the whole trip home my mother was haunted not by the gray exploding puffs of flak but with the odd empty whiteness of the Pacific sun through which she had been looking when Janice spoke.
When my mother returned to Hoboken, she left the house quietly one day to go to the local library. The woman at the desk looked at her curiously when she asked to see some articles on the internment of the Japanese. The stories were hard to find. There was very little. But what my mother did find made her slightly queasy, and she had to pull over as she drove home for fear of getting sick. Ochi’s name itself was never mentioned in the reports, of course, but he had spent almost two years in the Sand Hill Internment Camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had been taken from his family, strip searched, made to build his own tent, for months refused any paper or pencil. Slowly, over the months, he began to disintegrate under the humiliation. By the time he came out he spoke no English at all—he either refused or blocked out the memory of it—and he turned down the post of foreman at the plantation at which he had earlier worked. With his family he became a simple picker of pineapples, refusing to speak to anyone other than to say hello, discuss the weather, make plans for meals or family celebrations. I suspect Janice’s letters to us at that point in their lives were as much letters to herself, filling in for the conversations her husband refused to have. The other workers knew his story and didn’t bother him. Life was meant to go on. The past had been too hard to look back towards. They could never figure out how so withdrawn a man had found an American wife—a nurse they heard—and had drawn her into the relentless, exhausting labor of farming and the taciturn secrecy of his daily life.
But he hadn’t found her. She had found him. After the war, she had spent a month tracking him down. She had remembered his shy, uncomfortable stance at the reception where they had met before December 7. She remembered how she misunderstood what he had been saying, that he had tried, in his poor English, to explain that he was only there to translate. He was no one important, he had explained. Just a foreman, who knew less than people knew.
Throughout the war she thought of Ochi and his embarrassed apologies. She remembered how he refused the fruit on the table, as if it were not for him. She remembered how his buttons were not in the right holes on his shirt and how a scatter of red dust lay like a thin handprint on his right shoe. She remembered him—how he bowed to her when she said goodbye—as she waited on December 9 in the anteroom of the office of the colonel she had escorted to the party. She needed the colonel to sign acquisition papers for more medical supplies. He came out of his office just as a military policeman came in the waiting room. If the colonel recognized Janice, he didn’t show it. His face drooped with sleeplessness.
“We’ve got most of them,” the policeman said, and he showed the colonel a clipboard with a paper on it—names of those Japanese on the island who were to be rounded up and interned, though Janice had no idea of that. “We don’t have addresses for these people,” the policeman said, pointing to the clipboard.
The colonel read off the names to himself, as if they were people he knew. Furuya. Ochi. Soga. Takei.
“Ochi?” Janice asked. “Arata Ochi?” Both of the soldiers turned to her as if they hadn’t noticed her before. “I know him,” she said to the men. “I met him at the reception. He’s a plantation foreman.”
“You know him?” the colonel asked. “You know where he lives?”
“I don’t know where he lives,” she said, “but I know where he works.” She wondered what they could possibly need Ochi for. What could he do to help? His English wasn’t very good at all. Even she hadn’t understood what he was trying to say. But yes, she knew where he worked, and she was more than happy to tell the colonel where it was. She was excited about the chance to see him again.
Christian Michener
Until I was 17 and she came home, Aunt Janice was little more than a name, a character constructed from her letters from Lanai and my parents’ occasional stories. I recall only one photograph of her, standing wrapped in what looked like a blue cellophane jacket and pants, her face hidden underneath a hat resembling the conical basket where we kept rolled up towels in the downstairs bathroom. Ochi and I. June was the entire caption.
“Your Aunt Janice picks pineapples,” my mother said.
“How many pineapples can a picker pick if the picker isn’t sick?” my father sang.
“She and Ochi,” my mother said, without looking up from her cross-stitch.
Ochi was Aunt Janice’s husband, a Japanese man she had met when she was stationed as a nurse at Pearl Harbor. Once, at a Christmas party poker game, my Uncle John had proposed that the war had turned Janice’s mind inside out. That was why she had stayed on in Hawaii, abandoning her family and living as a farmhand with a man no one had met or talked to. “War does strange things to people,” Uncle John said.
My father was rearranging his chips, having just won a hand of five-card draw with a pair of jacks. The click of the chips against each other paused, then came in stiff, regular beats, like the clip of a toy plastic horse. My father had been at Guadalcanal. His best friend from high school, Evan Lassiter, had almost been there too. A few weeks earlier Evan had been running up a hillside beside my father, on Tulagi, and then he wasn’t. Twenty seconds of time disappeared from my father’s life. He and Evan had been running, then he was lifting himself off of the ground, and somewhere in the twenty seconds in between Evan Lassiter had vanished. Stretching out to my father’s right was a wash of limbs and entrails and black and vermilion uniforms on the hardened, pitted hillscape. Below him, as if Evan were being sucked back to sea, smoke and steam and sea surf stirred the air above the sand. A marine rushing up behind stepped on my father’s back as he lay looking down the hill. My father stood up and followed. He would soon be moved to Guadalcanal, where four more of his friends would disappear before the battle was over.
“Caring for the wounded would have been a luxury to most people,” my father said.
“Of course,” my Uncle John said. He had been too young to fight, and had only been drafted well after the fall of Berlin. “But she saw some bad things there.”
“People experience bad things too,” my father said. He would not look up. He continued to lift and tap his chips. The only other sound was the ice of someone’s Manhattan as they shook it.
“Let’s have another hand,” someone finally said.
But if not the war, what else would explain Aunt Janice? She had received her nursing degree, which is how she ended up at Pearl Harbor, but afterwards, stunned by the stench of the burning oil of December 7, by the flesh that peeled like charred pastry off the skin of the sailors, by what she saw in the blank eyes of those who rolled back across the Pacific, she joined Ochi—we knew him by no other name—after the war in the exhausting work along the long, leisurely green rows of the pineapple fields of Lanai. The difference from what the rest of us did—plugging in our Christmas lights in Hoboken each December, getting degrees from Fordham and Rutgers and Siena, watching the highways lace together the country, knotting up our ties or our aprons—made us imagine that Janice had simply lost her bearings the way the world itself had during the war. Ochi’s family got paid for how much they planted and how much they picked, and the family worked together, like a small corporation. Only Ochi, once a plantation foreman, spoke any English, and that very little—after the war, he spoke none at all. He had met Janice at a reception for local dignitaries several months before December 7. The plantation owner for whom he worked brought him along to help translate, imagining—wrongly—that the simple commands Ochi gave in English in the fields signaled a broader skill in the language. Janice had gone as a colonel’s escort. He introduced her only as Miss Wallace, and pointed repeatedly to the table of punch and fruit where most of the other women huddled in their own groups of startled uncertainty. She had started a conversation with Ochi, unaware he was not one of the honored guests.
“I am not here to talk,” Ochi said stiffly, struggling to make himself understood.
Janice stared at him. Did he think her not good enough to speak to?
He saw her look and tried to explain himself. “What you say I say again to everybody,” he said.
Was he warning her that he would share all her secrets and gossip? How could he consider her, a lady nurse, responsible for the tension between their countries? Later in the evening Ochi came over and managed to explain what he had meant—that he was nobody important, that he was only there to help translate.
But there was little he or anyone else could do to ease the tension in the room. In two months’ time the punch and the fruit would be remembered with nostalgia and shame.
During Janice’s years in Hawaii, six months would pass without a word from her, and then four letters might arrive within two weeks. They could be a short paragraph, or several pages of looping script. Some were mere lists of what she had done, others inscrutable meditations on ideas about justice or nature or communism. One was accompanied in a box by a pineapple, smuggled past customs, the “very last one of the season,” according to her letter. When we tried to cut it, its juicy innards exploded across the kitchen table like a burst vein.
No one had gone to her wedding, a traditional Shinto ceremony in a shrine whose red carpet bore the mottled stains of the rain that fell through a roof that limited supplies had kept from being repaired. “Shouldn’t we go?” my mother asked my father. “She’s your only sister.”
“Which makes it even worse,” my father said. We all knew what he meant—that she was marrying a Japanese man. My father tried, but he couldn’t control the quick twitch of his shoulders when he would pass a Japanese man on the sidewalk, and he would turn the channel when they spoke on the evening news in the 90s about the rising sun of the Japanese economy. These were the people who had removed Evan Lassiter from the world. Still, with a week to go before the ceremony, he sent his sister a crystal bowl engraved with the skyline of New York as it might appear if it were wrapped in a circle, the Statue of Liberty peering across the open space of the glass at the Empire State Building.
After Ochi died in the late 60s, Janice’s letters, though still frequent, began to express a vague dread about living her life so far from her roots with only her in-laws and the friends she had made there. In her strange, baroque language, which seemed to be her translating herself back into her own native English, she spoke about her life and what she wanted to do. I thought by marriage Ochi’s blood had mingled with mine so deeply that I was now of his family also—see, it’s still his, not our—but alas, I feel the thinness of that blood, or the thinness of that which we shared, that can only seep away in time.
“Why can’t she talk like a normal person?” my father asked. “‘Alas.’ What the hell is that? Just come back home. She should have done it 20 years ago.”
“She needs a reason,” my mother said.
“A reason?” my father asked. “A reason for what?”
My mother didn’t answer, but the reason came on its own. Janice’s mother—my father’s mother, and Uncle John’s—had collapsed twice within a month, the second time from a stroke that left her uncertain on her feet, and it would do everyone good if Janice could move in with her. My grandmother almost welcomed her own dying if it meant getting Janice back for the last years of her life. My father had never been able to bring himself to meet Ochi, but he agreed that the idea of having Janice return was wonderful for everyone. Besides, my mother wrote to Janice, encouraging her return, you can always return to Hawaii if you do not like it here.
Please come get me, Janice wrote back. I don’t have the strength to do it myself.
“What the hell?” my father said.
My mother boarded a jet in Newark, her first flight. She claimed not to be scared, and perhaps did not think she was, but as the jet leaned into the sky her body felt hollowed and her skin cooled under a fine layer of sweat. Over the plains of Illinois and Missouri and Kansas she could not help thinking about what it must have felt like when her high school boyfriend, a year younger than her husband, took to the dark skies outside of Attlebridge, one of which would be his last flight. She had always felt ashamed of her husband’s hatred for the Japanese after the war, but aboard the flight to Los Angeles, she wondered what it must be like to have others want to kill you. She imagined outside her window, above the surf of the clouds, the black and gray puffs of smoke she had seen in the newsreels and movies of the flak the approaching Allies dodged on their bombing missions. She imagined their perverse beauty, like black flowers, the punch of their explosions, and felt the sickening emptiness in her gut as the thump and whompf of the shells punctuated the drone of the propellers. Where had such thoughts come from? Maybe from seeing her husband, hunched over a watery Scotch each evening in the dark family room, his memories of the war playing out before him in the corners of his mind. Around her the flak erupted, the plane shook, the sky sucked them down, seaward. About an hour into the flight my mother dipped into her purse for the small bottle of whiskey my father had told her he had snuck into her purse, and she nursed the tiny bottle, lick by lick, all the way through to Los Angeles, and then onto the red DC-9 of Hawaiian Airlines that would take her on to the islands.
When my mother arrived at Aunt Janice’s house, one of five cottages inhabited by Ochi’s extended family, she was told that Janice was out working in the pineapple fields. It was summer, time for harvesting, and Janice could not sit idly by herself waiting for my mother, thinking about her decision to leave the land and the life to which she had dedicated herself for the last seventeen years. The fields were dotted with the motions of the pickers, blue and red and white flowers bobbing on a sea of green and brown. The locals and migrants and students flown over from the other islands were all buried deep inside their clothes and goggles and hats so that it was impossible for my mother to distinguish her sister-in-law, whom she hadn’t seen since high school, from the rest of those working the fields. Three or four times she was directed to the wrong group of pickers. My mother wore the same white and light blue skirt she had put on before boarding in Newark and had to weave her way carefully along the rows to avoid the sharp edges of the pineapple leaves. The flak waiting beyond Attlebridge was far distant, dispersed by a blue sky and suffused light she had never walked through in Hoboken. Finally she was directed to Janice, who saw her approaching but kept working until my mother stopped confusedly amid all the workers who had stood up from their picking as she approached. At last Janice swung off her hat and scarf, and my mother saw how, despite the long years of working outside, Janice had aged far less than my mother had herself. “I’m packed,” Janice said by way of hello. “I couldn’t sit still.”
The shift from Hoboken to an imaginary Attlebridge to Honolulu to this woman whom my mother hadn’t seen since they passed each other unremarkably in the same high school hallways two decades earlier was too much. She felt dizzy with dislocation. Were there really such places where reddish dirt was sliced in symmetrical rows of sharp, gator-toothed leaves? Did a member of her husband’s family really leave Hoboken to make a life here? Had there really been black spikes that rattled the metal of airplanes, cold and doomed, over the English Sea, and sent her boyfriend into its depths? She sat down in the dirt, in her clean skirt, too faint to stand.
My brothers remember our weeks at Aunt Janice’s—at our grandmother’s, for the year longer she lived after Janice returned, at which point Janice stayed on—as a special thrill, our version of a vacation. They were younger than me. I was almost out of high school by the time Janice returned, and I didn’t understand what all the effort of packing the three of us up to go across town for a week was about. But I didn’t mind. I had friends but none from whom a week away would send me into the doldrums. There was, alas, no boyfriend to keep me up at night dreaming panicked dreams. My father’s gloom wore me down, as did my mother’s fine disregard for it. Whatever empathy and terror and thrill she had discovered in her descent through imaginary fire over Kansas City had dissipated like the dark grey smoke of those visions. She ironed, she drank her g&t’s, she snapped the lids to the lunchboxes closed each morning with satisfaction.
Janice had no television, which drove my brothers crazy, but somehow the days at her house passed quickly, in a series of adventures that supplied Luke and Daniel with lunchroom laughs for all of September when school would resume. Each year we would tell our parents what had happened—the three feral cats who ran into the basement and soon turned on each other until one of them was dead; the effort we made to stay up the entire night by drinking, on the hour, one cup of black coffee; the week we decided to follow a trail of streets through Hoboken so that our passage marked on a map spelled out our names—and each year they would look at each other and decide it wouldn’t be right to send us back, though they always did. Later in life, in trying to explain to my husband what these escapades with Janice were like, I realized that they all started as one thing and ended as another: building a bird feeder, which brought on the cats, became a terrifying testimony to nature red in tooth and claw, in grandma’s basement; a walk to the ice cream store, for which Janice insisted we needed the map, became a pointless, obsessive contest to scrawl our names across the city.
One summer we found ourselves in the midst of a civil war between Janice and her neighbors, the Proszeks. A crab apple tree that had long drooped its head from the back corner of my grandmother’s yard had finally managed to coax itself over the fence that separated Janice’s yard from the Proszeks’. In time, of course, it did what crab apple trees do: drop its sodden apples in the yard. The Proszeks took issue with this, first with small complaints, then with formal requests, and finally with a chain saw. They cut each branch off at the imaginary line above the wooden fence that separated their two yards, so that the tree resembled a large backward P, or a young girl dragging her hair in the wind. They tossed the branches that they had cut over the fence into Janice’s yard. She was staring out her kitchen window at the amputated tree when I walked up beside her. She wore a fancy button-up blouse and jeans tucked inside cowboy boots and three times lifted a coffee cup to her lips without taking a sip. “That tree was there ever since I was a little girl,” Janice said.
“Did the Proszeks do that?”
“I thought I heard a chainsaw last night,” she said. “I should have guessed.”
“Will it die?” I asked.
“Oh, everything dies,” Janice said. She raised the cup to her lips again, and I waited to see if at last she would take a sip. She didn’t. She nodded toward the loose branches, stacked like brittle corpses on the ground, and the dozens of orphaned crab apples surrounding them. “Let’s make jelly,” she said.
My brothers were still living at home when my father moved out. Or up rather, to the room above the garage, which under its peaked ceiling we had fitted out as a kind of storage room and spare bedroom. Visiting cousins had stayed there, braving the space between the garage and house in the early morning to rush to a shower or breakfast, and on occasion my girflfriends and I risked an adventurous sleepover, spying, without success, across the alley at the upper windows of the Turbervilles’. To my brothers, I learned later, the years of my father’s exile passed as images do in a bent mirror: expanding and retracting, distorting reality. They couldn’t quite say when they noticed he was always gone, always in the attic of the garage. The neighbors whispered divorce but it was never that. My parents were not fighting. My father did not hate or grow tired of my mother. There were no other women. There was just a cramped room above a garage, not even carpeted, with a radiator vent that lined the bottom of the walls and pressed upward tongue-drying heat, and there was him, inside that space. To give attention to some questions, as he chose to describe it. I believe Janice gave the words to him—they certainly sounded like her way of talking—though she had no responsibility for his running away. By then he had been let go at his glass company. He had logged enough years for the corporation to label it a retirement, with benefits tagging along behind him. He pretended the annex was a kind of workshop, even purchasing a table saw on which he laid out do-it-yourself instructions he bought in bunches at the hardware store for the complicated scrollwork of a bench back or the top of a pergola gate or milking stool. There were clumps of wood lying about on the saw and the floor, an apocalyptic bestiary of misshapen bodies, sawdust trailing off them like molted hides. “Those are just tests,” he told my mother, when she asked what he was making.
My mother would glance from time to time during the day up at the small window over the garage, behind which my father gave attention to his projects, though none of which, as far as I know, ever found their way to completion. She could never see him through the tiny window and its stubborn glare, and she wondered if he could spy her own movement through the house. The window reminded her of a small door that had been in the basement of her house as a child, inside of which was nothing but a dank and empty triangle of dust and a few rags so rotten as to be part of the dust itself. Each time she was asked to retrieve some potatoes or the laundry or an old bucket from her basement she would hurry past the door as if a troll were crouching there, waiting for the passing of her rushing feet.
When my Aunt Janice died, I of course flew back from Denver for the funeral. My father had died several years before. She would often visit him in his attic, chatting over tea she brought or checking on his woodworking. After we had buried him, I stayed on at my mother’s house for a few days to help clean out his things. Together my mother and I went one morning up into his workshop above the garage. At first there was nothing of surprise there, but as we were leaving my mother gestured to the back corner of the room, near my father’s table saw. “Look at that mess,” she said. Emerging from the corner of the room was a dense layer of sawdust, and scattered pell-mell on top of it were blocks of wood, the cast-offs and leftovers of his experiments. “He was always such a neat person,” my mother said in confusion.
I let her leave the room and start down the stairs before going over to look at the sawdust more closely. I noticed that something had been done to it—moistened, packed down, molded in some way—and that the blocks of wood were shaped, it seemed, with some thought, with curves and appendages like primitive depictions of bodies. Some of the pieces of wood had holes drilled through them. Had all of this just come together by accident, Janice cleaning up while she talked to my father? Or was it what I imagined? A crude diorama of a Pacific beach? I always forgot to ask Janice about it.
They had dressed Janice in a royal navy dress in her coffin, a string of deceptively fake pearls around her neck. It hardly resembled what she wore while alive: capris and halters, caftans and capes, Dallas Cowboys sweatshirts on those rare occasions she’d come to church. Inevitably, at family reunions, she would wear some plaid knickers and a polo, looking all the world like a Scottish golfer. “They should have dressed her in her caftan,” I said to my mother. “Or those red bloomer kind of things she used to wear.” For the funeral I brought a pineapple and put it on the floor next to the casket, and beside it placed a jar of the crab apple jelly, decades old now, that she and I had made when the Proszeks destroyed her tree and I kept as a memento.
My husband stayed home with our three children. None of them had ever known Janice. Maybe I hadn’t either. I never could shake the feeling after we had been together that I had been watching someone act as a caricature of herself. I never could quite figure out what drove her to act as she did, what made her Janice. Uncle John had his theory about the war, that she had been turned inside out, but I wasn’t so sure. How could she leave her mother and brothers behind for seventeen years? Why did she give up nursing to pick pineapples? Why the outrageous outfits? Why did she never talk about her in-laws once she left Hawaii? Unlike my father, who could not escape the ghost of Evan Lassiter and the smoke swirling above the Pacific beaches, my aunt put the past behind her, or at least out of sight of us. She would discuss politics or tell raunchy jokes or humiliate herself by dressing in tattered, foul-smelling clothes and crashing the high school homecoming dance to stir up concern for the homeless. But once she came back to Hoboken she never spoke about her years in Hawaii, her marriage to Ochi, her work on the plantations, her life with her in-laws. Only one time did she let slip a little of that past. She had been watching the news and saw film clips of some horrible tribal atrocities in Africa. She muttered something to herself I couldn’t make out. “What did you say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It was Japanese.”
“What did it mean?”
She took a while to answer, as if considering a good translation. “Only what a crazy world we live in,” she finally said.
I decided not to push her. I learned from my father that you could not push someone to share their secrets. But I regretted not pushing too, finding out more about why she did what she did. Being Janice, she had left the Proszeks two jars of the jelly we had made as a gift on their doorstep. “But they killed your tree,” I said.
Janice shrugged. “It’s what Ochi would want,” she said.
“He must have been a great man,” I said.
Janice waited a long time. I was hoping she would tell me more about him, what attracted her to someone who thought as Ochi did. “If you were so full of hate that you destroyed another person’s tree, and then that person gave you a gift, how would you feel?”
“Horrible,” I said.
Janice smiled. “Exactly,” she said.
Late in her life my mother would realize what should have been obvious: why hadn’t she turned that exhausting trip to Hawaii to collect Aunt Janice into a small vacation? My father had done well as a sales representative for the glass manufacturer he had worked for, but we never took vacations except to go to the shore for a long weekend or to drive up to New York to see the Statue or visit a museum. So after Janice’s family helped my mother from her faint into the farmland dirt, and after a night sleeping in the cottage Janice and Ochi had once shared, she and Janice took a taxi back out of the compound and down the dirt road to, eventually, Honolulu. As they drove away, my mother watched Janice closely, but she did not let Janice see. Her sister-in-law seemed to tremble, but only slightly, and didn’t turn around to watch the house she had lived in for over a decade disappear. In the trunk were three simple brown suitcases. They had been locked since my mother arrived.
My mother and Aunt Janice spent a day in Honolulu waiting for their flight back, but before they left Janice insisted that they take a trip to Sand Island, just inside the harbor. Bunkers and lookout towers were still visible. Two decades before men had stood here and looked out over the Pacific to where their buddies and thousands of others were fighting and suffering and dying. My mother pushed aside the vague stirrings of the flak she had imagined while flying over Kansas. She pushed aside the vision of her own husband out there over the waters as a young man amidst death and of the picture of Evan Lassiter in their high school yearbook.
“Ochi was here,” Janice said.
“When was that?” my mother asked absently.
“During the war. This was an internment camp.”
My mother didn’t ask any more questions, though Janice filled in some of the details, and the whole trip home my mother was haunted not by the gray exploding puffs of flak but with the odd empty whiteness of the Pacific sun through which she had been looking when Janice spoke.
When my mother returned to Hoboken, she left the house quietly one day to go to the local library. The woman at the desk looked at her curiously when she asked to see some articles on the internment of the Japanese. The stories were hard to find. There was very little. But what my mother did find made her slightly queasy, and she had to pull over as she drove home for fear of getting sick. Ochi’s name itself was never mentioned in the reports, of course, but he had spent almost two years in the Sand Hill Internment Camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had been taken from his family, strip searched, made to build his own tent, for months refused any paper or pencil. Slowly, over the months, he began to disintegrate under the humiliation. By the time he came out he spoke no English at all—he either refused or blocked out the memory of it—and he turned down the post of foreman at the plantation at which he had earlier worked. With his family he became a simple picker of pineapples, refusing to speak to anyone other than to say hello, discuss the weather, make plans for meals or family celebrations. I suspect Janice’s letters to us at that point in their lives were as much letters to herself, filling in for the conversations her husband refused to have. The other workers knew his story and didn’t bother him. Life was meant to go on. The past had been too hard to look back towards. They could never figure out how so withdrawn a man had found an American wife—a nurse they heard—and had drawn her into the relentless, exhausting labor of farming and the taciturn secrecy of his daily life.
But he hadn’t found her. She had found him. After the war, she had spent a month tracking him down. She had remembered his shy, uncomfortable stance at the reception where they had met before December 7. She remembered how she misunderstood what he had been saying, that he had tried, in his poor English, to explain that he was only there to translate. He was no one important, he had explained. Just a foreman, who knew less than people knew.
Throughout the war she thought of Ochi and his embarrassed apologies. She remembered how he refused the fruit on the table, as if it were not for him. She remembered how his buttons were not in the right holes on his shirt and how a scatter of red dust lay like a thin handprint on his right shoe. She remembered him—how he bowed to her when she said goodbye—as she waited on December 9 in the anteroom of the office of the colonel she had escorted to the party. She needed the colonel to sign acquisition papers for more medical supplies. He came out of his office just as a military policeman came in the waiting room. If the colonel recognized Janice, he didn’t show it. His face drooped with sleeplessness.
“We’ve got most of them,” the policeman said, and he showed the colonel a clipboard with a paper on it—names of those Japanese on the island who were to be rounded up and interned, though Janice had no idea of that. “We don’t have addresses for these people,” the policeman said, pointing to the clipboard.
The colonel read off the names to himself, as if they were people he knew. Furuya. Ochi. Soga. Takei.
“Ochi?” Janice asked. “Arata Ochi?” Both of the soldiers turned to her as if they hadn’t noticed her before. “I know him,” she said to the men. “I met him at the reception. He’s a plantation foreman.”
“You know him?” the colonel asked. “You know where he lives?”
“I don’t know where he lives,” she said, “but I know where he works.” She wondered what they could possibly need Ochi for. What could he do to help? His English wasn’t very good at all. Even she hadn’t understood what he was trying to say. But yes, she knew where he worked, and she was more than happy to tell the colonel where it was. She was excited about the chance to see him again.
