The Yokota Officers Club
The Yokota Officers Club by Sarah Bird, published by Alfred A. Knopf
(Page 3 of 3)
My little sister, Kit, just turned five, exactly eleven months younger than me, had shaken her head no, whipping the long springy coils of blond hair against her cheeks to reject, as usual, any suggestion made by my mother. She'd insisted on mashed potatoes. Period. No gravy. No butter.
"Get the kid what she wants," my father intervened.
Utterly seduced from the beginning by my mother's vision of what life ought to be, I ordered the scallops and parfait. Moe and I shared conspiratorial glances with each bite. Then, that night, the S.S. President Wilson‘s mountainous boilers shuddered to life. The tendrils of paper streamers we'd thrown overboard to the crowd on the dock far beneath us snapped as the colossus slid, implacable as an iceberg, away from land. The instant the ship commenced teetering on the waves beyond the harbor, up, then down, I turned into a human snowglobe. My contents swirled nonstop for the entire twelve days we were at sea.
Kit, pronounced "a born sailor" by our father, loved it. The long voyage that debilitated me left her in rampaging health. Like our father, she fed on everything that sickened me: motion, change, attention, people. She rampaged through shuffleboard tournaments, splashed in the saltwater swimming pool that sloshed from side to side, rolling in time with the dark waves. She ordered Shirley Temples with extra cherries from the deck steward, Bunny-Hopped with our father, watched magic shows, and sat at the officer's table while I lay in bed, the boiler hammering at my head, nibbling crackers and flat 7UP, struggling to keep peristaltic action moving downward.
I was indescribably grateful to my trampoline stomach. Each time my sister burst through the oblong-shaped door into our dark room to throw down the ribbon she had just won for leading the longest Bunny Hop line or cannonballing the most water out of the swimming pool, then raced back out to win the Best Smile contest, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and nestled more deeply into the sodden sheets. Not only had sea-sickness brought me to this paradise of unlimited time alone with Moe, it had won me a temporary reprieve from strangers, from outsiders. As a daughter of the military, it would not last long. All too soon there would be classrooms, buses, playgrounds, neighborhoods filled with strangers. There would be teachers who might be kind, might be cruel, would probably simply be perplexed by the new girl who would only stop crying when she was reading while her sister—nearly a whole year younger!—would have five little girls fighting to be her best friend before the bus, the bus, the B. U. S., had even halted at their stop the first day. "Here, give me a tug." Moe propped herself up on her elbow, pivoted around, and stuck her toe out to me. I helped her pull off the rubberized tube of support stocking. Puffy purple worms of varicose vein throbbed on her leg.
Moe's smell filled our cabin. I concentrated on picking out the odors to keep from throwing up: Baby Magic with its scent of celery and babies. An ammonia tang from the permanent she'd given herself back at the Travis Air Force Base BOQ, where we'd stayed before leaving. The funk of body-warmed rubber. Slung beneath all that was the hammock of her regular smell, the smoky mint odor of Kool menthol cigarettes, a light pretzelly sweat scent, and Joy perfume.
"Moe, what did you look like when you were a little girl?"
Moe pulled the flap of her skirt back up and studied me for a long moment before answering. "Me? Oh, I was a funny-looking runt. Like a wormy pup with my big tummy and spindly arms and legs. And my knees! What a mess! Covered in scabs because I couldn't walk a foot without falling."
"Look!" I pulled my spindly leg out from under the damp sheet and pointed to the bumper of scab on my knee.
"How about that?" Moe shook her head at the coincidence.
"What else?" I prompted eagerly.
Moe angled the reading lamp until its light fell on my face.
"Oh, dark circles under my eyes, from too much worrying and reading and not enough sleeping. And my hair! Had a mind of its own. Like a black cat caught in a rainstorm."
This was miraculous information! Moe had looked just like me when she was little. I wanted to believe this so much I didn't ask how spiky cat fur hair like mine could have ever turned into heavy Cleopatra hair like hers. Or how my raccoon-shadowed eyes could possibly have evolved into her dark-lashed wonders. Then I remembered and touched my badge of shame. "Yeah, but you didn't have this."
"I don't see why you hate your widow's peak."
"Because it makes me look like Dracula."
"You do not look like Dracula. It gives your face a wonderful heart shape. Vivien Leigh has a widow's peak. All the great beauties have them."
"So why did the kids back at Mather call me Dracula?"
"Because the kids back at Mather were congenital idiots."
With no warning, preliminary retching sounds issued from my throat.
"Oh, brother, here we go again!" Moe lunged out of bed, grabbing the bowl on the floor. A bitter froth of Dramamine and bile came up. Even sitting up for that short a period caused my vision to drain downhill, leaving my head black. Moe grabbed me before I passed out and helped me lie back down. Her gray eyes passed across me, concerned, and for the first time I realized I was really sick. Not just faking it like I usually would to get out of the Bunny Hop and Best Smile Contest.
"You think this is crowded." My mother laughed and my stomach eased at her tone, jaunty and confiding, as if she were answering some snappily hilarious comment that I, her daughter, the shyest six-year-old in the galaxy, had just made.
"You should have seen our room on the troopship over to Casablanca. No bigger than this, crammed with sixteen nurses, and fourteen of us seemed to have our period the whole way over."
"Dotty Halpern, Mimsie Goldblatt, Becky Cohen, Jackie Friedman . . ." Moe lit a Kool and drew in, head tilted up, chin tipped out, in the movie-star way she had when she was inhaling memory. "Me and Caroline were the only shiksas in the crew."
I had no more idea what a shiksa was than a period, but if that was what my mother was I could only assume it meant glamour babe.
"What a crew." Moe laughed, shook her head, and, recalling the madcap group, made the clucking sound out of the side of her mouth that was her highest form of praise.
I rolled onto my side and snuggled in, slipping my hands in prayer position between my knees. This was my favorite position for my favorite activity, listening to Moe's nurse stories.
"Those gals could make the best of a tough situation. Sixteen women cooped up in a stateroom made for a honeymoon couple? Damp underwear hanging down everywhere like vines in a tropical jungle? Never knowing when a U-boat would decide that you were going to be that day's target practice? The unit that left just ahead of us was torpedoed. What a way to die: alone on the sea, engine oil flaming all around you."
She took a drag and waved both the smoke and the image away, dismissing them with the words she used to take the curse off all vexations, "Machts nichts." I repeated the magical words under my breath. Mox nix.
"We put it out of our minds. Had our CARE packages open before we left harbor. Shared everything: halvah, butter cookies, sour balls. Of course, I had my fudge. It wasn't kosher, but that didn't stop anyone. It was wartime. That was when I first started admiring the Hebrew faith. Those gals knew we were all in it together and we might as well just make the best of it. What wisenheimers. And we were singing all the time. Bigger bunch of ninnies you never saw."
"Moe?"
"Yes, poopsie."
"Make designs, okay?"
"Sure, poops."
She turned off the light and painted patterns in the darkness with the orange tip of her cigarette. Tracers of ack-ack fire arced through the night, zipping about in roller-coasting slides of light that blurred as the Dramamine dazed me back toward sleep. I thought I said the word "Sing," but couldn't be sure, as Moe seemed to start crooning before I could open my mouth. She sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and I saw her with her fifteen girlfriends perched about in a jungle of damp underwear, all singing, all in it together, as they crossed the Atlantic headed for Casablanca. My mother's throbbing, Judy Garlandesque voice and smell—earthy, rich with grown-up-lady pleasures and secrets—blended together. Her face was the moon, lit by comet flashes of a swirling cigarette, shining down on a perfect world.
The memory flashes past in seconds and I am again on a plane moments away from falling into the East China Sea.
"Boy, howdy." The sound in the cabin returns. "Tell you what, better get our shocks checked out." The pilot's casual, folksy tone mocks our noncombatant terror. "Got a little bumpy back there. Stewardesses, if you will, prepare the cabin for landing. "It takes the Jesus woman a second to unloose the death grip she has on the older stewardess, whose face has turned the color of window putty. She straightens up and slings a few bags back into the overhead bins, slams them shut, and looks behind her. The aisle is clogged with disgorged bags. The veteran stew shakes her head and goes to the front of the cabin, where she sits stiffly next to her cowardly colleague.
My ears pop as we descend through shifting strata of clouds. Outside the window, Okinawa has grown only to the size of a white scarf and lightning still sizzles past the window. As we break through the cloud deck, though, my head fills with the smells of Baby Magic, Kool cigarettes, tangerines, caramelized sugar, honeysuckle, and Fumiko's Young Pinkoo lipstick, and I no longer have the slightest doubt that we will land safely.
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