lot, Lanier’s usual face and voice and demeanor had already snapped back into place. But Jackie didn’t buy it anymore. She’d seen something that she wished to see more of.
FRANK DIDN’T tell his father, but it was the rabbits and frogs that swayed him. Not that he was sick of going to Little Tokyo, although that was also true. Every weekday that summer he was working at Old Man Larabie’s store, and every Saturday he made his own trip to Li’l Tokyo with his sister and the Hiraoka brothers for three hours of practicing kanji and bowing stiffly at Japanese school. The last thing he wanted to do on his one day off was to go back again and follow his parents around as they shopped, as they called on their old-time friends. Especially since he’d just seen them all anyway at the big kenjinkai picnic in Griffith Park, where all the Issei from Nagano-ken had gathered to feast, play, trade news of home, get red-cheeked and teary-eyed from sake and beer. Get intoxicated, too, on their memories of mountains and rice paddies and the plump, juicy apples that his father said made the American kind look like raisins. And he’d see them all again in another three weeks at the Nisei festival, which Frank didn’t mind as much because he liked the colorful parade, the red dancing lion with its swirling mane, the women in bright kimonos, the men with drums so large you couldn’t see their faces. And because he liked the sumo tournament, the powdered sweating bodies and slick tied hair and the small, t-shaped, diaper-like mawashis. And most of all, because he was performing in the judo exhibition in the new, still-stiff white uniform he’d paid for with his earnings from the store.
But Sundays were too much. They didn’t live in Li’l Tokyo anymore—the Sakais had left when Frank was eight, moving into a small house off of Crenshaw Boulevard, a few miles southwest of downtown. His parents still made the trip by train every day, though, to get to their jobs—his father’s at the City Market in the Southwest Berry Exchange, his mother’s shaping and slicing fishcakes at the kamaboko factory. And his father stayed in town late two nights a week to gamble with his friends, a habit from his bachelor days that years of arguments and marriage had done nothing to change. Frank had worked with his father at the Berry Exchange for the last three summers, sorting the berries, picking out the rotten ones, arranging them in crates for all the grocers who came in from their stores. But he was fifteen now and he had his own job in his own neighborhood, working for Larabie, whom he’d known from his store—the Mesa Corner Market—but also saw downtown on the old man’s morning trips for fruit and produce. So as his father was stepping outside to warm up the car, Frank called out to him.
“I don’t want to go,” he said.
His father whirled around. “Eh?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Nani? Do shite?”
“Because we go every Sunday and you’re there every day during the week. I want a day off. I want to stay around here today.”
His father pressed his lips together and pointed out the door at the car. His fingers were nicked and stained crimson and blue, the marks of harvesting, and handling bleeding berries. “You come,” he said. “You come Little Tokyo.”
“No.”
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