inevitably, that any daddy would dread. Finally Momoko would press her lips together. “Hmm,” she would grunt. “Two peas in a pod.” Only she’d pronounce it more like “Tsu pi-su ina pod-do,” and then she’d give a little nod that made it for sure. Did he teach her that phrase? She seemed to enjoy saying it, enjoy her role in your ceremony, although with that act of abnegation, she put herself outside the two of you. What did that cost her? At least a small twinge of belonging, because if your heart was any measure, your face must have lit up like the sun, to hear her pronouncement. Did that hurt her, too? It was triumph to you. Flesh of her flesh, turning from her—you would have banished her entirely, had you not needed the power of her affirmation. Oh, yeah, your allegiances were firmly with Daddy.
And Daddy would chuckle. Pat your cheek. He was always as shy with his love as you were ferocious with yours, but even if its expression was tentative, the fact of his love was absolute. Then. So what the fuck happened?
It wasn’t your fault! you wanted to cry. It was just life, filtering into your prattle at the supper table, that so offended him, and how were you to know? You’d always shared what you’d learned in school, playing teacher even then, telling him all about the Pilgrims, for example, or how the telegraph was invented, or the names for the parts of a flower. “Pistil, stamen, stigma . . .” He’d frown with concentration, repeating the names after you, slowly, as though he’d never heard them before. “And what does a stamen do?” he’d prompt, pretending to be confused. And you would proudly teach, “A stamen does this and such,” and he would nod and smile at you and say, “My, my, my!” like he just couldn’t believe how one little daughter—and his, at that—could be so bright. His love for you was absolute, all right. Until you changed the subject.
It wasn’t your fault that the sexual reproduction of flowering plants failed to hold your interest. You were becoming an adolescent, after all. When your conversation veered off like a car out of control, toward shades of frosted lipstick and the boys who smoked Pall Malls in the weeds behind the maintenance shed at school, Lloyd’s face froze. He grew surly at the sight of your love beads, recoiled at any mention of rock and roll. The first time you used the word “groovy,” he choked on his gravy.
“You are not leaving the house dressed like that,” he said, catching you sneaking out the door in your worn jeans with all the holes and patches. “I won’t have you parading all over town dressed like a beggar.” You turned around to face him. “Your navel is showing,” he added, eyeing it with disgust.
If he couldn’t even tolerate your navel, then how was he to cope when life kick-started changes inside you that went deeper still?
The next year, in ninth grade, there was a man, a history teacher named Elliot Rhodes, slouching in front of the blackboard in a rumpled flannel shirt, stroking his mustache. When he read out loud in class, he looked right at you. At first you thought it was your imagination, but after a couple of times you knew it was for real, and your stomach heaved so violently you could hardly breathe at all. At first you mistook this passion for vocation—you’d always known you would be a teacher (or an explorer or a poet, you weren’t exactly sure which), and now you understood why! The power of his knowledge made you weak in the knees. That fall, he taught you all about the great civilizations of the world. He pressed you to question your beliefs, to think about real ideas. He considered Japan to be spiritual and deep, and he taught you a koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? You carried it home in your heart and whispered it to yourself every day, stunned at its poetic profundity. When you told it to Momoko, she looked at you like you were nuts.
“But, Mom, it’s Japanese. It’s Zen.”
“Stupid. Make no sense.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to help you reach enlightenment.”
“Never heard of it. Anyway, why you need enlighten when you got good Methodist church to go to?”
“Oh, Mom.” You sighed, glancing at Lloyd before going one step further. “I don’t believe in organized religion.”
Lloyd looked up and shuddered.
At church there’d been talk. Rhodes had just graduated from some liberal college in California. He was a hippie, a commie, an anarchist, a freak. What did they know? In fact, he was a conscientious objector, and you knew this because he told you, after school, the day you lingered in the classroom once the other kids had gone home. He’d protested the war in Vietnam. He’d marched on Washington. He admired Asian culture. He could never go over there, as a soldier, to kill. You leaned against the edge of his desk. He looked at you with an enormous aching, and for the first time you understood the tragedy that was war. He reached up, traced the slant of your eye with his thumb, told you he had a thing for—
Abruptly he turned away. Tugged at his mustache and sent you home, but even though you had to walk for miles because you missed the bus, you were brimming with such a wild joy it felt like flying. You’d sensed his struggle, the sudden gruffness in his voice, the violence in the muscles of his back as he attacked the blackboard with his eraser. The back of a grown man. The fall sky turned steely, then darkened to dusk. You did a skippy little jig in the gravel. The stars were out by the time you sauntered into the kitchen.
Momoko looked at Lloyd. Lloyd cleared his throat, wiped pie from the corner of his mouth. “You’re late.”
“I stayed after school.” Surfing the edge of a long-suffering sigh.
“You in some kinda trouble?” Momoko asked, bringing a plate of franks and beans that she had kept hot in the oven.
“No.” Pricking the rubbery pink lozenges with your tines. “I had to help Mr. Rhodes.”
Lloyd hemmed and hawed, and you could feel the slow ache of his thinking. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started excavating his back molars. When he got to the front incisors, he snapped the toothpick in half and placed it on the edge of his plate. Finally he wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I don’t trust that man. He has dubious morals.”
“He does not! He’s an activist. A man of conscience! Just because he won’t go fight a war in Asia. That’s more than you can say!”
Lloyd drew in his breath like he’d been sucker-punched. Put down his fork and napkin and pushed to his feet. His eyes were as cold and bright as the sun on snow in winter. It was as if he could see into the corners of your mind, know thoughts before you had a chance to think them, track the rebel contents of your heart. As a child you were secure in his omniscience, knowing that everything occurring on this earth did so with his blessing, according to his will. Now you looked away.
“What’s happened to your morals, Yumi?” His voice sounded dead.
You couldn’t raise your eyes from your dinner plate. “I believe anything is okay as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.”
Cassie’s dad would have whipped her for talking back. You got sent to your room, which was where you wanted to be in the first place.
At the Thanksgiving pageant, Mr. Rhodes slumped in the front row, and standing center stage, you felt him watching. The play seemed silly, and you’d long outgrown your role, but even so, the words were never as rich in all the years you’d said them.
“Noble Pilgrims,” you recited, voice trembling, “my people and I welcome you to our land. We know
