Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (24 page)

Are Sherman and I in love? Three days later, I hazard that we are. My thinking proceeds this way: I think he’s cute, and I think he thinks I’m cute. On the other hand, we don’t kiss and we don’t exactly have fantastic conversations. Our talks
are
getting better, though. We started out, “This is a book.” “Book.” “This is a chair.” “Chair.” Advancing to, “What is this?” “This is a book.” Now, for fun, he tests me.

“What is this?” he says.

“This is a book,” I say, as if I’m the one who has to learn how to talk.

He claps. “Good!”

Meanwhile, people ask me all about him, I could be his press agent.

“No, he doesn’t eat raw fish.”

“No, his father wasn’t a kamikaze pilot.”

“No, he can’t do karate.”

“Are you sure?” somebody asks.

Indeed he doesn’t know karate, but judo he does. I am hurt I’m not the one to find this out; the guys know from gym class. They line up to be flipped, he flips them all onto the
floor, and after that he doesn’t eat lunch at the girls’ table with me anymore. I’m more or less glad. Meaning, when he was there, I never knew what to say. Now that he’s gone, though, I seem to be stuck at the “This is a chair” level of conversation. Ancient Chinese eating habits have lost their cachet; all I get are more and more questions about me and Sherman. “I dunno,” I’m saying all the time.
Are
we going out? We do stuff, it’s true. For example, I take him to the department stores, explain to him who shops in Alexander’s, who shops in Saks. I tell him my family’s the type that shops in Alexander’s. He says he’s sorry. In Saks he gets lost; either that, or else I’m the lost one. (It’s true I find him calmly waiting at the front door, hands behind his back, like a guard.) I take him to the candy store. I take him to the bagel store. Sherman is crazy about bagels. I explain to him that Lender’s is gross, he should get his bagels from the bagel store. He says thank you.

“Are you going steady?” people want to know.

How can we go steady when he doesn’t have an ID bracelet? On the other hand, he brings me more presents than I think any girl’s ever gotten before. Oranges. Flowers. A little bag of bagels. But what do they mean? Do they mean thank you, I enjoyed our trip; do they mean I like you; do they mean I decided I liked the Lender’s better even if they are gross, you can have these? Sometimes I think he’s acting on his mother’s instructions. Also I know at least a couple of the presents were supposed to go to our teachers. He told me that once and turned red. I figured it still might mean something that he didn’t throw them out.

More and more now, we joke. Like, instead of “I’m thinking,” he always says, “I’m sinking,” which we both think is so funny, that all either one of us has to do is pretend to be drowning and the other one cracks up. And he tells me things—for example, that there are electric lights everywhere in Tokyo now.

“You mean you didn’t have them before?”

“Everywhere now!” He’s amazed too. “Since Olympics!”

“Olympics?”

“Nineteen sixty,” he says proudly, and as proof, hums for me the Olympic theme song. “You know?”

“Sure,” I say, and hum with him happily. We could be a picture on a UNICEF poster. The only problem is that I don’t really understand what the Olympics have to do with the modernization of Japan, any more than I get this other story he tells me, about that hole in his left eyebrow, which is from some time his father accidentally hit him with a lit cigarette. When Sherman was a baby. His father was drunk, having been out carousing; his mother was very mad but didn’t say anything, just cleaned the whole house. Then his father was so ashamed he bowed to ask her forgiveness.

“Your mother cleaned the house?”

Sherman nods solemnly.

“And your father
bowed?
” I find this more astounding than anything I ever thought to make up. “That is so weird.” I tell him.

“Weird,” he agrees. “This I no forget, forever.
Father
bow to
mother!
”

We shake our heads.

As for the things he asks me, they’re not topics I ever discussed before. Do I like it here? Of course I like it here, I was born here, I say. Am I Jewish? Jewish! I laugh.
Oy
! Am I American? “Sure I’m American,” I say. “Everybody who’s born here is American, and also some people who convert from what they were before. You could become American.” But he says no, he could never. “Sure you could,” I say. “You only have to learn some rules and speeches.”

“But I Japanese,” he says.

“You could become American anyway,” I say. “Like I
could
become Jewish, if I wanted to. I’d just have to switch, that’s all.”

“But you Catholic,” he says.

I think maybe he doesn’t get what means switch.

I introduce him to Mrs. Wilder’s turkey pot pies. “Gross?” he asks. I say they are, but we like them anyway. “Don’t tell anybody.” He promises. We bake them, eat them. While we’re eating, he’s drawing me pictures.

“This American,” he says, and he draws something that looks like John Wayne. “This Jewish,” he says, and draws something that looks like the Wicked Witch of the West, only male.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

He’s undeterred. “This Japanese,” he says, and draws a fair rendition of himself. “This Chinese,” he says, and draws what looks to be another fair rendition of himself.

“How can you tell them apart?”

“This way,” he says, and he puts the picture of the Chinese so that it is looking at the pictures of the American and the Jew. The Japanese faces the wall. Then he draws another picture, of a Japanese flag, so that the Japanese has that to contemplate. “Chinese lost in department store,” he says. “Japanese know how go.” For fun, he then takes the Japanese flag and fastens it to the refrigerator door with magnets. “In school, in ceremony, we this way,” he explains, and bows to the picture.

When my mother comes in, her face is so red that with the white wall behind her she looks a bit like the Japanese flag herself. Yet I get the feeling I better not say so. First she doesn’t move. Then she snatches the flag off the refrigerator, so fast the magnets go flying. Two of them land on the stove. She crumples up the paper. She hisses at Sherman, “
This is the U.S. of A., do you hear me!
”

Sherman hears her.

“You call your mother right now, tell her come pick you up.”

He
understands perfectly.
I
, on the other hand, am stymied. How can two people who don’t really speak English understand each other better than I can understand them? “But Ma,” I say.

“Don’t
Ma
me,” she says.

Later on she explains that World War II was in China, too. “Hitler,” I say. “Nazis. Volkswagens.” I know the Japanese were on the wrong side, because they bombed Pearl Harbor. My mother explains about before that. The Napkin Massacre. “
Nan
-king,” she corrects me.

“Are you sure?” I say. “In school, they said the war was about putting the Jews in ovens.”

“Also about ovens.”

“About both?”

“Both.”

“That’s not what they said in school.”

“
Just forget about school.
”

Forget about school? “I thought we moved here for the schools.”

“We moved here,” she says, “for your education.”

Sometimes I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“I like Sherman,” I say after a while.

“He’s nice boy,” she agrees.

Meaning what? I would ask, except that my dad’s just come home, which means it’s time to start talking about whether we should build a brick wall across the front of the lawn. Recently a car made it almost into our living room, which was so scary, the driver fainted and an ambulance had to come. “We should have discussion,” my dad said after that. And so for about a week, every night we do.

“Are you just friends, or more than just friends?” Barbara Gugelstein is giving me the cross-ex.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Come on,” she says, “I told you
everything
about me and Andy.”

I actually
am
trying to tell Barbara everything about Sherman, but everything turns out to be nothing. Meaning, I can’t locate the conversation in what I have to say. Sherman and I go places, we talk, one time my mother threw him out of the house because of World War II.

“I think we’re just friends,” I say.

“You think or you’re sure?”

Now that I do less of the talking at lunch, I notice more what other people talk about—cheerleading, who likes who, this place in White Plains to get earrings. On none of these topics am I an expert. Of course, I’m still friends with Barbara Gugelstein, but I notice Danielle Meyers has spun away to other groups.

Barbara’s analysis goes this way: To be popular, you have to have big boobs, a note from your mother that lets you use her Lord and Taylor credit card, and a boyfriend. On the other hand, what’s so wrong with being unpopular? “We’ll get them in the end,” she says. It’s what her dad tells her. “Like they’ll turn out too dumb to do their own investing, and then they’ll get killed in fees and then they’ll have to move to towns where the schools stink. And my dad should know,” she winds up. “He’s a broker.”

“I guess,” I say.

But the next thing I know, I have a true crush on Sherman Matsumoto.
Mister
Judo, the guys call him now, with real respect; and the more they call him that, the more I don’t care that he carries a notebook with a cat on it.

I sigh. “Sherman.”

“I thought you were just friends,” says Barbara Gugelstein.

“We were,” I say mysteriously. This, I’ve noticed, is how Danielle Meyers talks; everything’s secret, she only lets out so
much, it’s like she didn’t grow up with everybody telling her she had to share.

And here’s the funny thing: The more I intimate that Sherman and I are more than just friends, the more it seems we actually are. It’s the old imagination giving reality a nudge. When I start to blush, he starts to blush; we reach a point where we can hardly talk at all.

“Well, there’s first base with tongue, and first base without,” I tell Barbara Gugelstein.

In fact, Sherman and I have brushed shoulders, which was equivalent to first base I was sure, maybe even second. I felt as though I’d turned into one huge shoulder; that’s all I was, one huge shoulder. We not only didn’t talk, we didn’t breathe. But how can I tell Barbara Gugelstein that? So instead I say, “Well, there’s second base and second base.”

Danielle Meyers is my friend again. She says, “I know exactly what you mean,” just to make Barbara Gugelstein feel bad.

“Like
what
do I mean?” I say.

Danielle Meyers can’t answer.

“You know what I think?” I tell Barbara the next day. “I think Danielle’s giving us a line.”

Barbara pulls thoughtfully on one of her pigtails.

If Sherman Matsumoto is never going to give me an ID to wear, he should at least get up the nerve to hold my hand. I don’t think he sees this. I think of the story he told me about his parents, and in a synaptic firestorm realize we don’t see the same thing at all.

So one day, when we happen to brush shoulders again, I don’t move away. He doesn’t move away either. There we are. Like a pair of bleachers, pushed together but not quite matched up. After a while, I have to breathe, I can’t help it. I
breathe in such a way that our elbows start to touch too. We are in a crowd, waiting for a bus. I crane my neck to look at the sign that says where the bus is going; now our wrists are touching. Then it happens: He links his pinky around mine.

Is that holding hands? Later, in bed, I wonder all night. One finger, and not even the biggest one.

Sherman is leaving in a month. Already! I think, well, I suppose he will leave and we’ll never even kiss. I guess that’s all right. Just then I’ve resigned myself to it, though, we hold hands, all five fingers. Once when we are at the bagel shop, then again in my parents’ kitchen. Then, when we are at the playground, he kisses the back of my hand.

He does it again not too long after that, in White Plains.

I invest in a bottle of mouthwash.

Instead of moving on, though, he kisses the back of my hand again. And again. I try raising my hand, hoping he’ll make the jump from my hand to my cheek. It’s like trying to wheedle an inchworm out the window. You know,
This way, this way.

All over the world, people have their own cultures.
That’s what we learned in social studies.

If we never kiss, I’m not going to take it personally.

It is the end of the school year. We’ve had parties. We’ve turned in our textbooks. Hooray! Outside the asphalt already steams if you spit on it. Sherman isn’t leaving for another couple of days, though, and he comes to visit every morning, staying until the afternoon, when Callie comes home from her big-deal job as a bank teller. We drink Kool-Aid in the backyard and hold hands until they are sweaty and make smacking noises coming apart. He tells me how busy his
parents are, getting ready for the move. His mother, particularly, is very tired. Mostly we are mournful.

The very last day we hold hands and do not let go. Our palms fill up with water like a blister. We do not care. We talk more than usual. How much airmail is to Japan, that kind of thing. Then suddenly he asks, will I marry him?

I’m only thirteen.

But when old? Sixteen?

If you come back to get me.

I come. Or you can come to Japan, be Japanese.

How can I be Japanese?

Like you become American. Switch.

He kisses me on the cheek, again and again and again.

His mother calls to say she’s coming to get him. I cry. I tell him how I’ve saved every present he’s ever given me—the ruler, the pencils, the bags from the bagels, all the flower petals. I even have the orange peels from the oranges.

All?

I put them in a jar.

I’d show him, except that we’re not allowed to go upstairs to my room. Anyway, something about the orange peels seems to choke him up too.
Mis
ter Judo, but I’ve gotten him in a soft spot. We are going together to the bathroom to get some toilet paper to wipe our eyes when poor tired Mrs. Matsumoto, driving a shiny new station wagon, skids up onto our lawn.