The Buddha in the Attic

THE CHILDREN

We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath the trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edges of the fields. We placed them in wooden apple boxes and nursed them every time we finished hoeing a row of beans. When they were older, and more rambunctious, we sometimes tied them to chairs. We strapped them onto our backs in the dead of winter in Redding and went out to prune the grapevines but some mornings it was so cold that their ears froze and bled. In early summer, in Stockton, we left them in nearby gullies while we dug up and sacked onions and began picking the first plums. We gave them sticks to play with in our absence and called out to them from time to time to let them know we were still there. Don’t bother the dogs. Don’t touch the bees. Don’t wander away or Papa will get mad. But when they tired and began to cry out for us we kept on working because if we didn’t we knew we would never pay off the debt on our lease. Mama can’t come. And after a while their voices grew fainter and their crying came to a stop. And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It’s time to go home.

SOME OF THEM were stubborn and willful and would not listen to a word we said. Others were more serene than the Buddha. He came into the world smiling. One loved her father more than anyone else. One hated bright colors. One would not go anywhere without his tin pail. One weaned herself at the age of thirteen months by pointing to a glass of milk on the counter and telling us, “I want.” Several were wise beyond their years. The fortune-teller told us he was born with the soul of an old man. They ate at the table like grown-ups. They never cried. They never complained. They never left their chopsticks standing upright in their rice. They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields. They drew pictures in the dirt for hours. And whenever we tried to pick them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, “I’m too heavy” or “Mama, rest.” They worried about us when we were tired. They worried about us when we were sad. They knew, without our telling them, when our knees were bothering us or it was our time of the month. They slept with us, at night, like puppies, on wooden boards covered with hay, and for the first time since coming to America we did not mind having someone else beside us in the bed.

ALWAYS, we had favorites. Perhaps it was our firstborn, Ichiro, who made us feel so much less lonely than we had been before. My husband has not spoken to me in more than two years. Or our second son, Yoichi, who taught himself how to read English by the time he was four. He’s a genius. Or Sunoko, who always tugged at our sleeve with such fierce urgency and then forgot what it was she wanted to say. “It will come to you later,” we would tell her, even though it never did. Some of us preferred our daughters, who were gentle and good, and some of us, like our mothers before us, preferred our sons. They’re the better gain on the farm. We fed them more than we did their sisters. We sided with them in arguments. We dressed them in nicer clothes. We scraped up our last pennies to take them to the doctor whenever they came down with fever, while our daughters we cared for at home. I applied a mustard plaster to her chest and said a prayer to the god of wind and bad colds. Because we knew that our daughters would leave us the moment they married, but our sons would provide for us in our old age.

USUALLY, our husbands had nothing to do with them. They never changed a single diaper. They never washed a dirty dish. They never touched a broom. In the evening, no matter how tired we were when we came in from the fields, they sat down and read the paper while we cooked dinner for the children and stayed up washing and mending piles of clothes until late. They never let us go to sleep before them. They never let us rise after the sun. You’ll set a bad example for the children. They never gave us even five minutes of rest. They were silent, weathered men who tramped in and out of the house in their muddy overalls muttering to themselves about sucker growth, the price of green beans, how many crates of celery they thought we could pull this year from the fields. They rarely spoke to their children, or even seemed to remember their names. Tell number three boy not to slouch when he walks. And if things grew too noisy at the table, they clapped their hands and shouted out, “That’s enough!” Their children, in turn, preferred not to speak to their fathers at all. Whenever one of them had something to say it always went through us. Tell Papa I need a nickel. Tell Papa there’s something wrong with one of the horses. Tell Papa he missed a spot shaving. Ask Papa how come he’s so old.

AS SOON AS WE COULD we put them to work in the fields. They picked strawberries with us in San Martin. They picked peas with us in Los Osos. They crawled behind us through the vineyards of Hughson and Del Rey as we cut down the raisin grapes and laid them out to dry on wooden trays in the sun. They hauled water. They cleared brush. They shoveled weeds. They chopped wood. They hoed in the blazing summer heat of the Imperial Valley before their bones were fully formed. Some of them were slow-moving and dreamy and planted entire rows of cauliflower sprouts upside down by mistake. Others could sort tomatoes faster than the fastest of the hired help. Many complained. They had stomachaches. Headaches. Their eyes were itching like crazy from the dust. Some of them pulled on their boots every morning without having to be told. One of them had a favorite pair of clippers, which he sharpened every evening in the barn after supper and would not let anyone else touch. One could not stop thinking about bugs. They’re everywhere. One sat down one day in the middle of an onion patch and said she wished she’d never been born. And we wondered if we had done the right thing, bringing them into this world. Not once did we ever have the money to buy them a single toy.

AND YET they played for hours like calves in the fields. They made swords out of broken grape stakes and dueled to a draw beneath the trees. They made kites out of newspaper and balsa wood and tied knives to the strings and had dogfights on windy days in the sky. They made twist-up dolls out of wire and straw and did evil things to them with sharpened chopsticks in the woods. They played shadow catch shadow on moonlit nights in the orchards, just as we had back home in Japan. They played kick the can and mumblety-peg and jan ken po. They had contests to see who could nail together the most packing crates the night before we went to market and who could hang the longest from the walnut tree without letting go. They folded squares of paper into airplanes and birds and watched them fly away. They collected crows’ nests and snake skins, beetle shells, acorns, rusty iron stakes from down by the tracks. They learned the names of the planets. They read each other’s palms. Your life line is unusually short. They told each other’s fortunes. One day you will take a long journey on a train. They went out into the barn after supper with their kerosene lanterns and played mama and papa in the loft. Now slap your belly and make a sound like you’re dying. And on hot summer nights, when it was ninety-eight degrees, they spread their blankets out beneath the peach trees and dreamed of picnics down by the river, a new eraser, a book, a ball, a china doll with blinking violet eyes, leaving home, one day, for the great world beyond.

BEYOND THE FARM, they’d heard, there were strange pale children who grew up entirely indoors and knew nothing of the fields and streams. Some of these children, they’d heard, had never even seen a tree. Their mothers won’t let them go outside and play in the sun. Beyond the farm, they’d heard, there were fancy white houses with gold-framed mirrors and crystal doorknobs and porcelain toilets that flushed with the yank of a chain. And they don’t even make a smell. Beyond the farm, they’d heard, there were mattresses stuffed with hard metal springs that were somehow as soft as a cloud (Goro’s sister had gone away to work as a maid in the city and when she came back she said that the beds there were so soft she had to sleep on the floor). Beyond the farm, they’d heard, there were mothers who ate their breakfast every morning in bed and fathers who sat on cushioned chairs all day long in their offices shouting orders into a phone—and for this, they got paid. Beyond the farm, they’d heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home.

THEY CAUGHT TADPOLES and dragonflies down by the creek and put them into glass jars. They watched us kill the chickens. They found the places in the hills where the deer had last slept and lay down in their round nests in the tall, flattened grass. They pulled the tails off of lizards to see how long it would take them to grow back. Nothing’s happening. They brought home baby sparrows that had fallen from the trees and fed them sweetened rice gruel with a toothpick but in the morning, when they woke, the sparrows were dead. “Nature doesn’t care,” we told them. They sat on the fence and watched the farmer in the next field over leading his cow up to meet with the bull. They saw a mother cat eating her own kittens. “It happens,” we explained. They heard us being taken late at night by our husbands, who would not leave us alone even though we had long ago lost our looks. “It doesn’t matter what you look like in the dark,” we were told. They bathed with us every evening, out of doors, in giant wooden tubs heated over a fire and sank down to their chins in the hot steaming water. They leaned back their heads. They closed their eyes. They reached out for our hands. They asked us questions. How do you know when you’re dead? What if there were no birds? What if you have red spots all over your body but nothing hurts? Is it true that the Chinese really eat pigs’ feet?

THEY HAD THINGS to keep them safe. A red bottle cap. A glass marble. A postcard of two Russian beauties strolling along the Songhua River sent to them by an uncle who was stationed in Manchuria. They had lucky white feathers that they carried with them at all times in their pockets, and stones wrapped in soft cloth that they pulled out of drawers and held—just for a moment, until the bad feeling went away—in their hands. They had secret words that they whispered to themselves whenever they felt afraid. They had favorite trees that they climbed up into whenever they wanted to be alone. Everyone please go away. They had favorite sisters in whose arms they could instantly fall asleep. They had hated older brothers with whom they refused to be left alone in a room. He’ll kill me. They had dogs from whom they were inseparable and to whom they could tell all the things they could not tell anyone else. I broke Papa’s pipe and buried it under a tree. They had their own rules. Never sleep with your pillow facing toward the north (Hoshiko had gone to sleep with her pillow facing toward the north and in the middle of the night she stopped breathing and died). They had their own rituals. You must always throw salt where a hobo has been. They had their own beliefs. If you see a spider in the morning you will have good luck. If you lie down after eating you will turn into a cow. If you wear a basket on your head you will stop growing. A single flower means death.

WE TOLD THEM stories about tongue-cut sparrows and grateful cranes and baby doves that always remembered to let their parents perch on the higher branch. We tried to teach them manners. Never point with your chopsticks. Never suck on your chopsticks. Never take the last piece of food from a plate. We praised them when they were kind to others but told them not to expect to be rewarded for their good deeds. We scolded them whenever they tried to talk back. We taught them never to accept a handout. We taught them never to brag. We taught them everything we knew. A fortune begins with a penny. It is better to suffer ill than to do ill. You must give back whatever you receive. Don’t be loud like the Americans. Stay away from the Chinese. They don’t like us. Watch out for the Koreans. They hate us. Be careful around the Filipinos. They’re worse than the Koreans. Never marry an Okinawan. They’re not real Japanese.

IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, especially, we often lost them early. To diphtheria and the measles. Tonsillitis. Whooping cough. Mysterious infections that turned gangrenous overnight. One of them was bitten by a poisonous black spider in the outhouse and came down with fever. One was kicked in the stomach by our favorite gray mule. One disappeared while we were sorting the peaches in the packing shed and even though we looked under every rock and tree for her we never did find her and after that we were never the same. I lost the will to live. One tumbled out of the truck while we were driving the rhubarb to market and fell into a coma from which he never awoke. One was kidnapped by a pear picker from a nearby orchard whose advances we had repeatedly rebuffed. I should have just told him yes. Another was badly burned when the moonshine still exploded out back behind the barn and lived for only a day. The last thing she said to me was “Mama, don’t forget to look up at the sky.” Several drowned. One in the Calaveras River. One in the Nacimiento. One in an irrigation ditch. One in a laundry tub we knew we should not have left out overnight. And every year, in August, on the Feast of the Dead, we lit white paper lanterns on their gravestones and welcomed their spirits back to earth for a day. And at the end of that day, when it was time for them to leave, we set the paper lanterns afloat on the river to guide them safely home. For they were Buddhas now, who resided in the Land of Bliss.

A FEW OF US were unable to have them, and this was the worst fate of all. For without an heir to carry on the family name the spirits of our ancestors would cease to exist. I feel like I came all the way to America for nothing. Sometimes we tried going to the faith healer, who told us that our uterus was the wrong shape and there was nothing that could be done. “Your destiny has been settled by the gods,” she said to us, and then she showed us to the door. Or we consulted the acupuncturist, Dr. Ishida, who took one look at us and said, “Too much yang,” and gave us herbs to nourish our yin and blood. And three months later we found ourselves miscarrying yet again. Sometimes we were sent by our husband back home to Japan, where the rumors would follow us for the rest of our lives. “Divorced,” the neighbors would whisper. And, “I hear she’s dry as a gourd.” Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she would make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not—the only thing he wanted, he had said to us, was to grow old by our side—we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing outside my window in the trees.

IN J-TOWN they lived with us eight and nine to a room behind our barbershops and bathhouses and in tiny unpainted apartments that were so dark we had to leave the lights on all day long. They chopped carrots for us in our restaurants. They stacked apples for us at our fruit stands. They climbed up onto their bicycles and delivered bags of groceries to our customers’ back doors. They separated the colors from the whites in our basement laundries and quickly learned to tell the difference between a red wine stain and blood. They swept the floors of our boardinghouses. They changed towels. They stripped sheets. They made up the beds. They opened doors on things that should never be seen. I thought he was praying but he was dead. They brought supper every evening to the elderly widow in 4A from Nagasaki, Mrs. Kawamura, who worked as a chambermaid at the Hotel Drexel and had no children of her own. My husband was a gambler who left me with only forty-five cents. They played go in the lobby with the bachelor, Mr. Morita, who started out as a presser at the Empress Hand Laundry thirty years ago and still worked there as a presser to this day. It all went by so fast. They trailed their fathers from one yard to the next as they made their gardening rounds and learned how to trim the hedges and mow the grass. They waited for us on wooden slatted benches in the park while we finished cleaning the houses across the street. Don’t talk to strangers, we told them. Study hard. Be patient. Whatever you do, don’t end up like me.

AT SCHOOL they sat in the back of the classroom in their homemade clothes with the Mexicans and spoke in timid, faltering voices. They never raised their hands. They never smiled. At recess they huddled together in a corner of the school yard and whispered among themselves in their secret, shameful language. In the cafeteria they were always last in line for lunch. Some of them—our firstborns—hardly knew any English and whenever they were called upon to speak their knees began to shake. One of them, when asked her name by the teacher, replied, “Six,” and the laughter rang in her ears for days. Another said his name was Table, and for the rest of his life that was what he was called. Many of them begged us not to be sent back, but within weeks, it seemed, they could name all the animals in English and read aloud every sign that they saw whenever we went shopping downtown—the street of the tall timber poles, they told us, was called State Street, and the street of the unfriendly barbers was Grove, and the bridge from which Mr. Itami had jumped after the stock market collapsed was the Last Chance Bridge—and wherever they went they were able to make their desires known. One chocolate malt, please.

ONE BY ONE all the old words we had taught them began to disappear from their heads. They forgot the names of the flowers in Japanese. They forgot the names of the colors. They forgot the names of the fox god and the thunder god and the god of poverty, whom we could never escape. No matter how long we live in this country they’ll never let us buy land. They forgot the name of the water goddess, Mizu Gami, who protected our rivers and streams and insisted that we keep our wells clean. They forgot the words for snow-light and bell cricket and fleeing in the night. They forgot what to say at the altar to our dead ancestors, who watched over us night and day. They forgot how to count. They forgot how to pray. They spent their days now living in the new language, whose twenty-six letters still eluded us even though we had been in America for years. All I learned was the letter x so I could sign my name at the bank. They pronounced their l’s and r’s with ease. And even when we sent them to the Buddhist church on Saturdays to study Japanese they did not learn a thing. The only reason my children go is to get out of working in the store. But whenever we heard them talking out loud in their sleep the words that came out of their mouths came out—we were sure of it—in Japanese.

THEY GAVE THEMSELVES new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce. One called herself Doris. One called herself Peggy. Many called themselves George. Saburo was called Chinky by all the others because he looked just like a Chinaman. Toshitachi was called Harlem because his skin was so dark. Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. “It’s his mother’s name,” she explained. To which we replied, “So is yours.” Sumire called herself Violet. Shizuko was Sugar. Makoto was just Mac. Shigeharu Takagi joined the Baptist church at the age of nine and changed his name to Paul. Edison Kobayashi was born lazy but had a photographic memory and could tell you the name of every person he’d ever met. Grace Sugita didn’t like ice cream. Too cold. Kitty Matsutaro expected nothing and got nothing in return. Six-foot-four Tiny Honda was the biggest Japanese we’d ever seen. Mop Yamasaki had long hair and liked to dress like a girl. Lefty Hayashi was the star pitcher at Emerson Junior High. Sam Nishimura had been sent to Tokyo to receive a proper Japanese education and had just returned to America after six and a half years. They made him start all over again in the first grade. Daisy Takada had perfect posture and liked to do things in sets of four. Mabel Ota’s father had gone bankrupt three times. Lester Nakano’s family bought all their clothes at the Goodwill. Tommy Takayama’s mother was—everyone knew it—a whore. She has six different children by five different men. And two of them are twins.

SOON we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that’s hatched goose’s eggs. They preferred their own company to ours and pretended not to understand a word that we said. Our daughters took big long steps, in the American manner, and moved with undignified haste. They wore their garments too loose. They swayed their hips like mares. They chattered away like coolies the moment they came home from school and said whatever popped into their minds. Mr. Dempsey has a folded ear. Our sons grew enormous. They insisted on eating bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast instead of bean-paste soup. They refused to use chopsticks. They drank gallons of milk. They poured ketchup all over their rice. They spoke perfect English just like on the radio and whenever they caught us bowing before the kitchen god in the kitchen and clapping our hands they rolled their eyes and said, “Mama, please.”

MOSTLY, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can’t you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor’s birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

SOME OF THEM developed unusually good vocabularies and became the best students in their class. They won prizes for best essay on California wildflowers. They received highest honors in science. They had more gold stars than anyone else on the teacher’s chart. Others fell behind every year during harvest season and had to repeat the same grade twice. One got pregnant at fourteen and was sent away to live with her grandparents on a silkworm farm in remote western Japan. Every week she writes to me asking when she can come home. One took his own life. Several quit school. A few ran wild. They formed their own gangs. They made up their own rules. No knives. No girls. No Chinese allowed. They went around late at night looking for other people to fight. Let’s go beat up some Filipinos. And when they were too lazy to leave the neighborhood they stayed at home and fought among themselves. You goddamn Jap! Others kept their heads down and tried not to be seen. They went to no parties (they were invited to no parties). They played no instruments (they had no instruments to play). They never got Valentines (they never sent Valentines). They didn’t like to dance (they didn’t have the right shoes). They floated ghostlike, through the halls, with their eyes turned away and their books clutched to their chests, as though lost in a dream. If someone called them a name behind their back they did not hear it. If someone called them a name to their face they just nodded and walked on. If they were given the oldest textbooks to use in math class they shrugged and took it in stride. I never really liked algebra anyway. If their pictures appeared at the end of the yearbook they pretended not to mind. “That’s just the way it is,” they said to themselves. And, “So what?” And, “Who cares?” Because they knew that no matter what they did they would never really fit in. We’re just a bunch of Buddhaheads.

THEY LEARNED which mothers would let them come over (Mrs. Henke, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Alfred Chandler III) and which would not (all the other mothers). They learned which barbers would cut their hair (the Negro barbers) and which barbers to avoid (the grumpy barbers on the south side of Grove). They learned that there were certain things that would never be theirs: higher noses, fairer complexions, longer legs that might be noticed from afar. Every morning I do my stretching exercises but it doesn’t seem to help. They learned when they could go swimming at the YMCA—Colored days are on Mondays—and when they could go to the picture show at the Pantages Theater downtown (never). They learned that they should always call the restaurant first. Do you serve Japanese? They learned not to go out alone during the daytime and what to do if they found themselves cornered in an alley after dark. Just tell them you know judo. And if that didn’t work, they learned to fight back with their fists. They respect you when you’re strong. They learned to find protectors. They learned to hide their anger. No, of course. I don’t mind. That’s fine. Go ahead. They learned never to show their fear. They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.

STILL, they dreamed. One swore she would one day marry a preacher so she wouldn’t have to pick berries on Sundays. One wanted to save up enough money to buy his own farm. One wanted to become a tomato grower like his father. One wanted to become anything but. One wanted to plant a vineyard. One wanted to start his own label. I’d call it Fukuda Orchards. One could not wait until the day she got off the ranch. One wanted to go to college even though no one she knew had ever left the town. I know it’s crazy, but … One loved living out in the country and never wanted to leave. It’s better here. Nobody knows who we are. One wanted something more but could not say exactly what it was. This just isn’t enough. One wanted a Swing King drum set with hi-hat cymbals. One wanted a spotted pony. One wanted his own paper route. One wanted her own room, with a lock on the door. Anyone who came in would have to knock first. One wanted to become an artist and live in a garret in Paris. One wanted to go to refrigeration school. You can do it through the mail. One wanted to build bridges. One wanted to play the piano. One wanted to operate his own fruit stand alongside the highway instead of working for somebody else. One wanted to learn shorthand at the Merritt Secretarial Academy and get an inside job in an office. Then I’d have it made. One wanted to become the next Great Togo on the professional wrestling circuit. One wanted to become a state senator. One wanted to cut hair and open her own salon. One had polio and just wanted to breathe without her iron lung. One wanted to become a master seamstress. One wanted to become a teacher. One wanted to become a doctor. One wanted to become his sister. One wanted to become a gangster. One wanted to become a star. And even though we saw the darkness coming we said nothing and let them dream on.