“Take-sue,” she said, mispronouncing the name, “is that Hungarian? Or Bohunk? Or what? For the life of us, Nana and I couldn’t figure it out.”
She wanted to say, You don’t have to, but instead, just to watch the awareness sink deep into her mother’s face, she said, “Takesue. Three syllables. And the last one is suey, like chop suey.”
“Chop suey?” her mother repeated, looking puzzled. There was the sound of voices carrying down the street and through the glass of the front window, drunks coming back from the bars along the boardwalk. She let out a nervous laugh. “You don’t mean—? He isn’t Chinese, is he?”
This was the moment she’d been dancing around since the day Greg had come up to her in the commons, his hair long and thick and shining — longer than George Harrison’s, longer than anybody’s in any band she’d ever seen — bent over the table where she was sitting with her girlfriend Pattie and said, Weren’t you in Bieler’s class last semester?
“No, Mom,” she said, still standing there in the hallway, the letter tucked safely away, her bag over one shoulder and her peacoat hanging limp at her knees, “he’s not Chinese.” She took a moment, shrugging out from under the bag and looking her mother square in the face. “Takesue isn’t a Chinese name, it’s Japanese.”
And then, before her mother could gasp or snort or shout or spin her head around on her shoulders and scream, Japanese? You’re going with a Jap? After what they did to your father? she was across the room, down the hall and firmly shutting the door to her room behind her.
When Greg came up the steps on the day after Christmas, his arms laden with gift-wrapped packages and his father’s maroon Dodge Charger sitting at the curb behind him like a rocket ship at rest, her mother pulled open the door on a vision of beauty, only she didn’t see it that way. “Greg!” Kat called out, sailing across the room to him while her mother staggered back in shock, because not only was Greg a hippie, in a tie-dyed poncho, silver-striped pants, scuffed boots and a wide-brimmed hat with an eagle’s feather jutting proudly from the band, he was Asian too. Worse than Asian: Japanese. With a Fu Manchu mustache that framed his jaw in two dangling transparent wisps. Kat took his hand, led him into the front hall, saying, “Mom, I want to—” but her mother was gone, retreating into the bedroom at the back of the house.
She’d tried to warn him—My mother’s a little strange, you know, after the war and all, I mean, World War II—but she knew him well enough to see that he was as shocked as her mother was, shocked and hurt. Older people, the ignorant and the hidebound, with their fat white faces and five-dollar haircuts, might have derided him for dressing the way he did, for being a hippie, but that he could take in stride. Racism was another thing altogether. He was fifth generation, as American as anybody, his family was prosperous, with their own seafood business based out of Santa Barbara, and he was going to take his place in American society whether anybody liked it or not — and if he went out in the street and protested against the war in Vietnam, that was his privilege and his right. As was the way he chose to dress and what sort of records he played on the stereo and the drugs he put in his own body with the freest will in the world. That was Greg. That was the way he felt. And if the world was nothing but combat, so be it. She felt choked. Her mind was jumping from one misery to another like a cricket on a hot sidewalk. “Here,” she whispered, and she took his hand and pulled him forward.
Shoulders slumped, eyes down, he followed her stiffly into the living room, where her grandmother was sitting in the armchair, watching one of her soap operas.
She took the packages from him and set them down on the sofa. Then she raised her voice so her grandmother could hear and said, “Let me introduce you to my grandmother. Nana, this is Greg.”
Over the past year her grandmother had slipped into confusion, her face immobile, her gaze dulled, her hands jittery in her lap. With an effort, she raised her eyes and lifted her trembling chin. Greg bent forward, offered his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he murmured, but she just stared at the place where his hand was and said nothing in return.
“Greg’s my boyfriend, Nana — the one I’ve been telling you about?” she said, feeling cold suddenly, chilled, as if the house were a glacier that had just split in two, irreparably, forever. Turning to him, she said, “Nana’s a little hard of hearing”—a smile—“aren’t you, Nana? But my mother, I guess she must be changing into something a little dressier. . or something. You wait. I’ll go get her.”
His voice was terse — he was in the chasm of the glacier too. “Don’t bother,” he said.
She always liked to think it was during the vacation in Mexico that she got pregnant with Alma, but that couldn’t have been because Alma didn’t come along until October, so it must have been after they got back to school. At any rate, despite the fact that she was on the pill and on a conscious level didn’t have even the slightest inkling of the tiniest fleeting desire to get pregnant, or not yet anyway, she did, and that pregnancy froze her inside the glacier until it split all over again. She couldn’t go home. She didn’t. She graduated (her mother tearful at the ceremony, without knowing what she was crying over, or the extent of it anyway) and moved in with Greg, in Santa Barbara, and he started working on one of his father’s boats, diving for lobster and abalone off the back side of Santa Cruz.
At first they lived with Greg’s parents in a house on the mesa, just above the marina, but the house — a big rambling craftsman with upper and lower porches and views of the sea out of the south- and east-facing windows — was crowded for all its size. There were Greg’s five siblings, all younger than he and perpetually embroiled in their internecine disputes, his father’s mother, two bachelor uncles and an assortment of cats, dogs and caged and evilly cackling birds. Though they had a room to themselves, Kat just couldn’t feel at home. Her mother-in-law fought off every attempt she made to contribute — she wouldn’t let her chop vegetables, wash dishes, even take out the trash, and every time she settled into the sofa or wandered into the kitchen she felt like an intruder, which, in fact, she was. And no matter how utterly without prejudice she felt herself to be, it was nonetheless strange to find herself living in a Japanese household — or Japanese American, as she was constantly correcting herself.
It wasn’t that they were all that much different from anybody else — they ate steaks and burgers and hot dogs and all the rest of it, maybe more fish because fish was the family business — but that anything, any other household, even if it had been right next door to her mother’s house in Venice, would have seemed disorienting, especially in her condition. She was used to silence and order, a house in which three generations of women lived and worked in peace without the disruptive presence of men, children, pets. But here was chaos, here was the other, a new association and a new regime. The smells were different, the little rituals surrounding meals, where people sat, the noise and confusion of the kids and their mob of friends — even the dogs, a pair of Akitas, were like nothing she’d ever seen, their heads as broad and flat as a bear’s, their habits secretive, and where did they do their business? Time and again she’d surprised them in her bed and twice she’d found the blankets suspiciously damp.