The Yokota Officers Club
The Yokota Officers Club by Sarah Bird, published by Alfred A. Knopf
(Page 2 of 3)
For the past year, I had breathed civilian oxygen for the first time in my life. It caused me to forget that I was the daughter of Major Mason Patrick Root, just as much a representative of the United States as the serviceman himself. It caused me to join an antiwar group on campus, Damsels in Dissent.
I started to remember who I was at Travis Air Force Base, where I had to hang around reading The Confessions of Nat Turner while my request for a Space A flight worked its way through MATS. Just the acronyms for Space Available and Military Air Transport System were enough to resuscitate me with the air I'd inhaled for the past eighteen years. I was returning to a world where officer fathers lost their jobs when sons didn't mow the lawn, when daughters dated GIs, or when mothers misbehaved too often at Happy Hour. Who knew what happened when offspring allied themselves with groups that advised draftees to swallow balls of tinfoil and put laundry detergent in their armpits to fool induction center doctors? As we fly deeper and deeper into a world that is entirely military, I push that question out of my mind even further than I bury the memory of Fumiko. I've long since finished with Nat Turner and, desperate for the narcotizing effect of moving my eyes across print, I start on the pamphlet again. I don't get very far before lightning flashes outside the window. Almost simultaneously, thunder booms. Baby Brandi trembles, sucks her lip in, and wails. A crack of lightning explodes, and the clouds outside are illuminated in a battlefield flash of pale violet and gray. Finally, the clouds part, and far below there is, at last, some-thing visible in the darkness. Like a handkerchief tossed onto an endless field of mud, the island of Okinawa appears in the galaxy of black that is the night and the Pacific Ocean.
It seems impossible that they are all down there: my parents; Kit; the twins, Buzz and Abner; my little sister and brother, Bosco and Bob. It seems even more improbable that this plane is going to land on such a minute button of light.
Abruptly the plane slews to the side so violently that luggage bins pop open and diaper bags and duffels shoot into the air. All the babies and children cry. The stewardesses at the front are ashen-faced and stare at each other, wide-eyed, stricken. The smell of vomit, dirty diapers, and fear spikes through the cabin. The older stewardess speaks into a microphone. "Remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened." She has on chalky lipstick that makes her teeth look yellow. She tries to get the younger stewardess up to help her stuff bags back into overhead bins, but the younger one shakes her head and tightens the belt holding her into her seat facing us. Seeing open fear on a stewardess's face ignites panic in the cabin. The older one crimps her lips in disgust and wades into the aisle.
Lightning flashes continuously on all sides. A bolt crackles against the plane. Women scream as the thunder explodes. The older stewardess tries to speak through her microphone, but a roar of static is all that comes out.
Mascara-blackened tears streak Tammi's cheeks.
The woman behind me begins to pant as if she were giving birth. Another woman sitting on the aisle turns in her seat and tells us in a weirdly conversational tone, "Pray, everyone, okay? Just pray to Jesus."
But I am already praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary. She's much more likely to be interested in a plane filled with mothers and children.
The plane bucks violently and the brave stewardess is thrown to the floor. The panting woman behind me screams like a sleeper trying to wake from the nightmare of her own death. Full-scale panic breaks out, with all the dependent wives and all their children sobbing and ululating like Berbers.
Tammi turns to me and, in a voice as calm as if she were reporting how much apples were selling for at the base commissary, tells me, "We're going to die."
On the plane, all noise and all smells stop. Next to me, Tammi's face is red and squinched up from crying, but all I hear is the roar of an airplane's engine. I look around and see the experienced stew fight to get to her feet and the woman who wanted us all to pray to Jesus snatch at her so she falls down again, but I hear nothing.
Once again, I am the overwrought, unhealthily imaginative child prone to nervous attacks and stomach disorders with a neurotic attachment to my mother and a dangerous dependence upon sugar that I was on my first trip over these waters, and I understand that we are seconds away from going down in a storm over the East China Sea.
Then all I am aware of is my longing to be back with my family, and in return I am suffused with the depth of their wounded longing for me.
They left me behind when I was seventeen, and I had not been ready. I was a pupa in the world without the exoskeleton they had always provided. I long for them, especially Moe. Always Moe. I grip the pamphlet about Okinawa in my hands and stare at it. But all I see are the words of the pamphlet I read that first time twelve years ago.
Chapter Two
White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Service Men and Women and Dependents:
As members of our Armed Forces stationed overseas, you and your dependents are representatives of the American people with the essential mission of building goodwill for our country.
Service men and women are the largest group of official U.S. personnel stationed in foreign countries. As a result, people form their personal attitudes toward our country and our American way of life to a great extent by what they see and hear about American service personnel and their dependents.
As you serve abroad, the respect you show foreign laws and customs, your courteous regard for other ways of life, and your speech and manner help to mold the reputation of our country. Thus, you represent us all in bringing assurance to the people you meet that the United States is a friendly nation and one dedicated to the search for world peace and to the promotion of the well-being and security of Nations.
Your President and Commander in Chief,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Bernie, put that down. Reading will make you start throwing up again."
"I've got to. It's required."
"You don't got to do nothin', kiddo." My mother snapped the pamphlet entitled "Welcome to Yokota Air Base" out of my hand and flopped onto the lower bunk next to mine. She untied the strings on her navy-blue gabardine skirt that held up the flap of cheap black cotton covering her pregnant belly and squirted on a fat pink plop of Baby Magic lotion. Red stretch marks ran like lava down the white mound heaved up by her third child. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph." She huffed out a sigh and slathered the lotion around, covering acreage with the slapdash efficiency of a wallpaperer spreading paste. "This has got to be either twins or a baby mastodon. I sure wasn't this huge with you or your sister."
Moe glowed golden in the drizzle of illumination cast by the reading light embedded in the cabin's riveted metal. Her hand described a Great Circle around her belly like the one we were following around the globe from San Francisco to Japan. In the boiler room next to our cabin on the S.S. President Wilson, pistons boomed loud as a Victorian factory. My stomach heaved in time to the rise and fall of the great ship on the midnight blue waves. I sat up, panting, saliva flooding my mouth.
"Moe, I don't feel so good." I never called my mother Mom or Mama. Like her friends, I always called her Moe, short for her maiden name, Mohoric. She called me Bernie, short for Bernadette.
"Here. Sip." Moe reached across the narrow aisle separating the bunks to pass me a glass of warm 7UP, bending the accordion-crimped neck of the paper straw to my lips. As I sipped, she crushed a couple more Dramamine tablets between two spoons, added most of a packet of sugar, wet it with a few drops of 7UP pipetted up with the straw, and spooned it into me. "It's all that reading. You're too young to be reading so much. You should be out playing with other kids, exercising some muscle beside your brain."
"Actually, the brain is not a muscle."
Moe shook her head, then sagged back onto the bunk with a long sigh.
The trip had started with such promise. Our first night on board was spent bobbing peaceably in San Francisco Bay. We were summoned to dinner by a crewman in a white jacket tapping out three notes on a miniature xylophone. Our father was handsome in his white mess dress jacket, a Morse code of colored ribbons pinned on his chest, his hair dark and shiny as Dean Martin's. Moe's dark hair was pulled back by the silver combs he had bought her on their honeymoon in Cuba. The combs had shown off the slight droop at the top of Moe's right ear where, when she was a premature baby, a stupid nurse laid her in the incubator wrong and her soft, unformed ear had creased forever. But the flap of turned-down ear is like a mark in a book, a page creased to call you back to the best part, which is Moe's face. My mother is beautiful.
That night, the first night of our trip, as we sat in the dining room, Moe had been especially beautiful, her cheeks rosy with excitement. That the Air Force was sending her family, headed by a captain, overseas on a presidential luxury liner was a windfall she wanted us all to take full advantage of. "Order the sea scallops and parfait," she'd told Kit and me.
My Library
