1940 Mary had been thirteen, shuttling between regular school, Japanese school, and the restaurant where the whole family worked. She was too young to go out with friends the way her older sister did, but old enough to be jealous of her freedom. On Friday and Saturday nights, Mary would sit on the bed in the room they shared and watch her sister get dressed in saddle shoes, a Sloppy Joe sweater, and a short skirt exposing her knees. Then some handsome young Nisei boy would pick her up in his family’s car and they would go dancing in Li’l Tokyo, or sometimes, on International Night, the one night they were allowed, all the way up to the Palladium in Hollywood. Grace’s life seemed exciting and glamorous to her; it was as if she made short but regular trips to a country that Mary had never seen. She envied even the arguments Grace had with their parents, who objected to her clothes and late hours. She suspected that even when her parents waited up by the window, even when their voices rose so loud in anger that she and Ben both plugged their ears, they felt closer to their older child for the trouble she gave; their grudge had sweetened to a kind of delight.
She would have taken screaming fights over silence. She wanted only to be more than invisible hands—to have made-up eyes and sharp mouth and flailing arms like her sister, churning legs and crew-cut hair like her brother. Her parents, happily married although they’d courted through pictures, remained staunchly Japanese in their ways. The Takayas had been shocked by Grace, plunged into the cold and unfamiliar waters of raising a somehow-American child, and with Ben, their bodies had adjusted to the temperature. But Mary, the best-behaved of the children, the most devoted to them, they couldn’t quite manage to see.
And just when she was getting old enough to go to dances herself, just when Troy, from Japanese school, had given her a love letter, the war came and ruined all of her plans. She’d spent the years between fifteen and eighteen at Manzanar, the cramped space and barbed wire a particular kind of torture for a blossoming girl just getting ready to enter her life. It did free her from the restaurant, though, and the mailroom job she took at camp was far better than raw chicken and beef. Her brother didn’t mind the confinement so much—he just went to the camp school, then played outside all afternoon—and her sister worked in the administration office, spending her free time with friends from Little Tokyo.
But Grace, camp, her parents, everything, would have been bearable except for her sixteenth birthday. Her birthday fell in July, on one of the days when the heat was so powerful the whole camp was laid flat, and even the lizards were resting and still. Mary spent the day in the mailroom, cooled somewhat by the government fan, sorting mail for the next day’s delivery. A little after five, when she was getting ready to leave, a shadow fell across the doorway. She thought it was one of the workers, who’d all left for the day, returning for some forgotten item. But when she called out, asking who was there, Vince Tajiri stepped into the room. She gasped a bit, in spite of herself. Vince was the best-looking boy in tenth grade, the class vice president as well as the captain of the camp baseball team. He was taller than her father, light and muscular, with bright black eyes and tiny dimples in each of his cheeks. All the girls, including Mary, grew giggly and tongue-tied in his presence, but to Mary’s surprise, it was he who seemed nervous today.
“Uh, hi,” he said uncertainly.
“Hi,” she replied. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Yeah, you. It’s your birthday, right? I came to say happy birthday.”
She smiled, somewhat puzzled, but pleased. “Thanks.”
He took a few steps over and stopped next to the desk, where she was still seated in the straight-backed chair. He held out a small, already wilting wildflower, which she knew he’d gone all the way out to the edge of camp to pick. Two patches of sweat appeared in the armpits of his navy blue shirt, and while she usually thought of boy-sweat as rank and repulsive, she found it almost charming today. “Thanks,” she said again, taking the flower and setting it down on the desk. She looked up at him and her own nervousness was calmed by the terror she saw in his eyes. She felt the hair on her arms lift toward him, as if growing toward the sun. Then, just as the heat and closeness of his body were becoming unbearable, he leaned over and kissed her, quickly, on the lips. They both jumped away from each other. Then Mary stood up, shakily, and he moved back over. He kissed her again, and this time they stayed. Mary felt a pleasurable tingling sensation arc up and down her spine. She felt his firm, strong hands on her shoulders, on her back. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was—she! Mary Takaya!—and she was so involved in their hands and mouths and just-touching chests that she didn’t hear her sister come in.
There was a sharp, high gasp from the doorway. Mary turned, and Grace was standing just inside the door, hand clamped over her mouth. Mary was so startled she forgot to jump away from Vince. She looked at her sister (who’d come to take her back to the barracks, where their mother was going to surprise her with a cake), expecting her to say, I won’t tell Mom and Dad, or maybe, I will tell Mom and Dad. Anything but what she did do, which was laugh, at first softly, but then the sound broke the surface of her mouth and turned into a full, delighted whoop. “You?” Grace managed, between hysterical bursts. “Oh my God, oh my God, it’s so funny.”
Vince pulled away from Mary, not meeting her eyes. Finally, without saying a word, he squeezed out the door past Grace. Mary wanted to call out to him, but couldn’t risk more laughter. She hated her sister then. She hated her so much that she couldn’t look at her through the surprise of receiving the lemon cake, which her mother had made from carefully stocked provisions, hidden until her daughter’s birthday arrived. She hated her so much that when Grace left the camp to work as an assistant bookkeeper for a church in Chicago, Mary barely opened her mouth to say goodbye.
After the war, the Takayas reopened their restaurant, which they’d been lucky enough not to sell. Mary’s father had bought it from money pooled by their kenjinkai, and when most other Issei were selling their houses and businesses in the panicked spring of ’42, Takaya had flatly refused. Now, in 1947, he had as many black customers as Japanese, but he didn’t mind the shift in clientele; money was green no matter what the color of the hand it came out of. Mary worked at the restaurant every day. Her parents promised they’d let her go to college soon, as Grace had done; they just needed to get ahead in terms of money. But as a year passed, then two, then three, college was starting to seem as remote to her as the country her parents had come from.
Then one afternoon Frank Sakai came in and suddenly made her visible. He’d brought his mother, who he accompanied to Li’l Tokyo every week. He sat down and watched Mary, lifting his eyebrows, once, when she looked at him. When she came over to their table, turned his cup over and poured him some tea, he caught her eye and asked softly what was wrong. This boldness was so unusual for a Nisei man that she jerked back and spilled the hot liquid on his arm—a move that would have brought on a scolding from her father if he hadn’t known it was caused by love. No harm was done other than a red streak on Frank’s nicely muscled forearm, just where the boiling tea had hit, and after many embarrassed apologies and bows by both Mary and her parents, the whole incident seemed to be forgotten. Except that Frank Sakai’s steady gaze followed her around the restaurant, and she wondered how he’d known she was depressed. A few days later, her father and one of the customers had a conversation that Mary knew she was meant to overhear. Frank Sakai was a store manager, they made it known, well on his way to establishing himself enough to break away from the man he worked for and start his own business. At twenty-three he was still unmarried, and while his mother had tried to match him up with two beautiful and promising young Nisei girls, he had stubbornly insisted upon choosing his own bride. Mary appreciated her father’s efforts, but they really weren’t necessary—she had already noticed the young veteran with the slight hitch in his step. Her parents started letting her take breaks when the Sakais were there, nevermind that her mother had to pick up the slack of things left undone by the invisible hands. She and Frank spoke of their families, their hopes and aspirations. She wanted to be a teacher, and when she told him this, his eyes darkened with a sadness that she didn’t understand. It didn’t matter, though.
