the bridge was the town. Michiko leaned over the handrail to look at the willow that swayed above the river. Grey water rushed past below them with a roar.
Geechan gave her a small push. Michiko knew this meant she was to go on alone. She turned to her grandfather. “What if no one likes me?” she said in a low voice.
“Not like you?” Geechan’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. “You are nice girl with a smart head. Why they not like you?”
Michiko took a deep breath and stepped off the bridge. She walked for a bit, then turned to wave, but her grandfather had not waited. He was off to the field of hammers.
She smiled. Uncle Ted often joked about his nine-man team. He said the government paid eight men for eight hours to put up a house. When Geechan helped, they took a longer lunch break.
One night at dinner, Ted had used chopsticks to demonstrate how the little houses went together. “The posts go into the ground, and we lay the main beams,” he said. “Then we put the floor panels down, and the walls go up.” He told them how they built each wall with the door and window spaces right on the ground. Then they lifted the the wall and bolted it to the floor. After the stoves went in, they added the roof panels. The house was finished when they nailed the last panel down.
Several of her uncle’s small square wooden houses with shingle roofs now stood in the orchard. Smoke from one of the chimneys curled up into the pale blue sky. Maybe I will meet someone from those houses at school, she thought as she walked into town.
The spaces between the large roadside maples grew wider. She spied the church steeple as she approached the square wooden buildings on the corner. No buses, no streetcars, and no traffic lights, she could hear her aunt say as she turned and made her way down the main street.
A soft fragrance wafted towards her. It came from a small tidy house with scrolls of woodwork around the porch. A picket fence separated the house from the street. The arched gate was overgrown with a cloud of lavender and ivory lilacs that filled the air with their perfume.
Michiko stopped in the middle of the road to breathe in the fragrance. It reminded her of the cherry tree in her own backyard.
“Hey,” someone yelled, “move.”
The sound of the bicycle bell made her jump. Michiko darted in the same direction as the rider.
“Watch out!” the boy on the bike yelled. He stomped hard on his brakes. The bicycle wobbled and fell to one side. The boy fell off, and the bicycle landed on top of him.
Michiko could only stare at the brightly polished fenders and leather seat.
A boy got slowly up off the ground. He dusted himself off and looked up. “So, is it a dirty Jap that made me fall?”
“I didn’t mean—” Michiko started to say, but he cut her off.
“Next time, I’ll run you over.” His cold blue eyes told her he meant what he’d said. He turned and picked up his bike.
Michiko watched the white-walled balloon tires turn the corner. She continued to walk, but when she turned the corner, the Union Jack was fluttering high on the pole. That meant school had started. She broke into a run, making her pigtails smack hard against the side of her face.
Out of breath, she pushed open the schoolhouse door. Without thinking, she slipped off her shoes as she did at home and stepped into the schoolroom, leaving her shoes outside the door. Thirteen pairs of unsmiling eyes turned her way. The teacher put down her piece of thick yellow chalk. Michiko waited in the aisle, not knowing what to do next.
“Come in,” the teacher said.
Michiko moved forward.
A boy on the aisle looked down. “She ain’t got no shoes,” he exclaimed. “She must be even poorer than me.”
Everyone laughed, and Michiko hung her head.
“Now, now, boys and girls,” cautioned the teacher. “She must have shoes. Her socks are a lot whiter than any of yours.”
Several children bent to examine their own socks.
“Put your shoes back on,” the teacher directed Michiko kindly. “We don’t take our shoes off here.”
Michiko returned and thankfully slipped them back on. The coolness of the dark linoleum floor was already seeping through her socks.
“Come up to my desk,” the teacher said. She sat beside a clay pot of scraggly geranium plants. “My name is Miss Henderson,” she said softly. “You must be the little girl Mrs. Morrison came to see me about.”
Michiko stood before her, her hands at her side. She didn’t know what to say.
“What is your name?” the teacher asked.
Michiko whispered her full name. “I am Michiko Takara Minagawa.”
“Please say it again,” the teacher requested. “I didn’t quite hear you.”
Michiko whispered it a second time. The teacher shook her head.
“Maybe she’s Italian,” someone from the back offered. “Maria didn’t know English when she first came.”
“Write your name for me, please,” Miss Henderson directed as she pushed a piece of paper towards her. Michiko picked up a pencil and wrote her name.
“She better not be one of those yellow bellies,” a different voice from the back piped up.
The teacher looked up and frowned. “That’s enough,” she said. She looked at Michiko’s name for a minute and picked up the pencil. She crossed out some letters and wrote down some new ones. She examined the paper for a moment, then looked up at the class. “We have a new student,” Miss Henderson announced. She focused directly on the boy with the bike. “Boys and girls, meet Millie Gawa.”
“Hello, Millie Gawa,” they chorused.
The teacher pointed to a desk in the second last row. “You can sit beside Clarence.”
“Hey, Clarence,” a boy in the back called out. “Looks like you finally got yourself a girlfriend.”
Miss Henderson clapped her hands loudly. All went quiet.
Michiko slipped into the seat beside the boy named Clarence, who looked as if he had been born on the sun. Red hair fell about his freckled face in curls. His large ears, rimmed with sunburn, stuck straight out like the open doors of her father’s car. His nose peeled. Clarence wore a long-sleeved plaid flannel shirt and brown corduroy pants. One of the buttons on the cuff was missing. The corner of the pocket was slightly torn.
Her mother would never have let her come to school like that, Michiko thought. She’d let down the hem of Michiko’s cotton skirt, washed it, and dried it. Her white blouse was spotless.
They spent the morning writing out addition questions and multiplication tables. At recess, Michiko stood with her back to the wall, watching the children coo like pigeons over the green and ivory bicycle leaning against the wall.
“It’s
