1001 Cranes Read online

  I stare at two Japanese masks hanging beside the door. One, a hideous demon face with horns and a menacing grin, is made out of wood. The eyes are lifelike; the mask’s creator even carved out the dark of his pupils. Next to the demon is the white face of a woman, her skin the color of the ashy end of a cigarette. She smiles sweetly and her eyes slope down like two commas on their sides. I don’t know which mask is spookier; even though the woman is smiling, she’s probably not smiling on the inside.

  “You must be thirsty. How about some Coke?” Aunt Janet gestures toward a television inside a fake-wood console in the living room. “You can watch TV. Or play solitaire on the computer.”

  I shake my head.

  “You’ll be in your mom’s old room, but we haven’t had time to clean it just yet. Tonight you and your mom will have to stay in the living room on the couch. I hope that’s okay. It’ll be like a slumber party.”

  Yeah, I think. The last person I want sleeping next to me is my mother.

  “Sit down. Sit down, Angie. Please.”

  I stay by the door for a moment, just to spite her. But there is something about her lumpy figure that softens my hard edges.

  I go into the living room and sit on the couch. The living room is the opposite of our tidy one up north. The Inui house isn’t dirty, but overfilled, like a small man who has eaten too much. At any time, the room could belch or vomit its contents, like an active volcano.

  Grandma Michi and Gramps don’t like to think in ones. They think instead in twos, fours, and sixes. There isn’t only one rooster knickknack marking Gramps’s birth in the year of the rooster, but four of them in different sizes and made of different materials, next to a black grizzly bear statue with a clock in its middle; six dancing Japanese dolls; and at least eight kokeshi dolls, the skinny wooden ones with no arms or legs. What freaks me out about those—as well as Hello Kitty—is that they have no mouths. They can’t eat or smile or talk.

  On each side of the fireplace are four built-in white brick cubbyholes stuffed with household items—plastic soda holders, wooden boards that were attached to bright pink fish cakes called kamaboko, toilet paper cardboard rolls. Why does Grandma Michi hold on to junk? It makes me feel anxious and sad at the same time.

  “Coke?” Aunt Janet brings a glass of soda with ice cubes and places it on a crocheted coaster on the coffee table. The table is already stained with countless circles, so I don’t know what good the coaster is.

  I take a sip and feel the fizz go up my nose. I wish I could spend all afternoon inhaling, feeling bubbles and not much else. But carbonation doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t last forever.

  On the wall across from the couch are about a dozen framed photographs of the family. The only black-and-white one is of Gramps and Grandma’s wedding. Gramps was so handsome then, his jet-black hair oiled and combed back. The line of his nose reminds me of the marking of an extra-sharp pencil. He looked like he could have been a scientist. Grandma, on the other hand, had a bigger build than she does now; you can even see it through her white satin dress. She had broad shoulders, like a football player, as well as a broad face. She reminds me of a bear, not a scary grizzly or a soft stuffed teddy bear, but something in between. There was a deep wrinkle at the top of her nose, a secret zipper; if you tugged at it, ghouls and ghosts would tumble out, telling stories of what it was like to be held captive in Grandma Michi’s head.

  In the center of the wall is a family photo, a little crooked, taken at least twelve years later. Gramps and Grandma, looking a little worn around the edges—hair thinner and wrinkles by their eyes and mouths—with my mom and Aunt Janet. Even though Aunt Janet is only three years older than Mom, at eight years old she looked like she outweighed Mom by fifty pounds. I’ve always wanted a brother or a sister but I don’t know what I would do if I had a mini Mom. Aunt Janet does not seem to mind. She is oblivious that Mom is ten times smarter and more beautiful.

  I can’t make out a small photo in the corner, and I rise to get a closer look. It’s Aunt Janet in a red cowboy hat, with Gramps, in dark glasses, kneeling beside her. They must have been at a petting zoo, because a goat was nibbling off the brim of Janet’s cowboy hat. Aunt Janet was daddy’s little girl and so am I. That is one of the few things we have in common.

  “Cute,” I say. “You looked real cute back then.” My cheeks flush as I realize how mean that sounds, but Janet doesn’t seem to mind.

  “TV?”

  I shake my head.

  “Do you want to see our new one-thousand-and-one-cranes room?” For a split second, it looks as if Aunt Janet’s eyes become darker and more expansive. She’s excited, more excited than I’ve ever seen her.

  “All right,” I say, placing the soda glass on the coaster.

  I follow Aunt Janet through a narrow hallway to a rectangular room that used to be their storage room. It is just as cluttered as the rest of the house and almost cavelike. Then I see them along the wall: the 1001-cranes displays. Hundreds of gold and silver folded cranes shine against black backgrounds like minerals in a dark, deep mine. And when I get closer, I can see the individual cranes, flat against each other like scales of a golden fish.

  “There’s a saying: ‘If one crane has a hundred years of life, a thousand cranes will have a million years of life.’ So maybe all these marriages will last a million years.”

  I look back at Aunt Janet and she has a goofy grin on her face. Even though she’s old, she has no clue about the real world.

  The cranes are arranged in all sorts of designs. Japanese writing. A butterfly beginning to bat its wings. A snowcapped mountain. Flowers and leaves open to the sky. The cranes are all metallic, except for a red one glued to the bottom of each display.

  There’s a pile of loose origami cranes gleaming like gold coins in a pirate’s stash on top of two folding tables next to a row of glue containers.

  “Careful,” Aunt Janet says as I pick up one of the cranes. “Are your hands clean?”

  I drop it back into its pile and Aunt Janet lets out a noise that is something between a laugh and a relieved sigh. “Oh, that’s a B crane. Never mind.”

  “Huh?”

  “We grade them—A, B, and C. The Bs and Cs go on the bottom, where you can’t see them as much.”

  Aunt Janet then points to a row of black-framed images against the other side of the wall. The poor Cs are the cranes that are mostly covered with layers of the As and the Bs. If I was graded, I would be labeled a C—something that goes in the background.

  I’m amazed that my aunt Janet and Grandma Michi take so much time to glue all these origami birds together.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “Why don’t you open the birds up?”

  The best thing about making an origami crane is pulling at its wings and puffing up its middle. In one stroke, you give life to a bird. It changes from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Why would they want to keep the cranes flat?

  “Silly,” Aunt Janet says. “How can you frame it? Lasts longer this way.”

  I’m getting the idea that I’ve entered a different world. I can hold on to my Mill Valley world or I can let go to fully enter this new one.

  “That one says ‘kotobuki,’ or ‘longevity,’” Janet says, referring to cranes assembled in the shape of some Japanese writing, strokes bringing to mind a man pulling his left leg in after kicking.

  “Longevity,” I repeat. “It looks Chinese, like those things they have on the wall of a Chinese restaurant.”

  “Same characters,” Janet explains. “The Japanese call their writing kanji. Those others are of mon, family crests.”

  “Neat,” I say. “What’s our crest?”

  “Well, you get it from your mother’s side, so we’re not quite sure. Mom’s family doesn’t have good records like Dad’s.”

  I study the images for a while.

  “You’ve done origami before?” Aunt Janet asks.

  “In elementary school.” I did a few origami cranes back then,
but I never really got the hang of it. I’ve also done my share of paper airplanes since then with my dad, but I don’t think that counts.

  “Oh yeah, and fortune-tellers,” I say, remembering. My friends in Mill Valley love origami, and in grade school we all made fortune-tellers out of blue-lined paper. You’d put your fingers in the slots, say a quick incantation, and then have another girl make her selection. Underneath the folded triangle would be her fortune. The good girls would write You’re going to marry a really cute guy, or You’re super-nice. But my friends and I created fortunes that read You’re going to marry a geek, and You’re going to fall into a hole and die.

  “You’ll learn soon enough. Mom will teach you.”

  I would prefer for Aunt Janet to teach me instead, but I don’t say anything. Aunt Janet holds out a booklet to me. I notice for the first time that her fingers are strangely shaped, splayed out, with large flat nails shaped like mini clamshells. “Here, you might want to take a look at this.”

  MICHI’S 1001-CRANES FOLDING TIPS, the cover reads. The simple black-and-white booklet is photocopied and stapled. It is typewritten, with a few hand-drawn diagrams of how best to fold an origami crane.

  I read the first tip: Before you start, make sure your hands are clean.

  I start to feel scared. Grandma Michi and Aunt Janet take this all very seriously. What will happen if I mess up?

  I return the booklet to the table and walk away, dragging my finger along the plastic sleeves and the covers of photo albums stacked there. In the corner, like a brilliant exotic flower from Hawaii or a gigantic flame, are strings of multicolored cranes, all open and in flight.

  “Ooooh, I like this one,” I say, turning back to Aunt Janet. “All the colors. The cranes aren’t so smashed up like those in the frames. And the wings are open.”

  “I made that for your parents. When they got married.”

  “Mom said that she wasn’t into origami cranes.”

  “She probably forgot. I mean, it was such a long time ago. I don’t think Japanese Americans were really even doing them much for weddings back then. Well, maybe in Hawaii.”

  “It’s not even dusty.”

  “I clean it every week. With a feather duster.”

  Somehow, hearing that makes me both happy and sad. Happy that someone cares about my mom and dad’s being together. And sad because it seems like we are actually falling apart in three separate pieces.

  “They’re pretty, but you can’t really see the cranes too well. It’s like they disappear with all the other ones,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “But this has a thousand and one cranes—exactly. Some people cheat, you know. They use fewer than a thousand and one. But I keep an exact count.”

  “So what would happen if it wasn’t exact?”

  Aunt Janet hesitates, and her lips part for a moment, so I know she is irritated. “Well, it wouldn’t be right,” she says.

  The back door of the 1001-cranes room opens, and there is Grandma, her hands full of paper bags and boxes. Aunt Janet rushes over to help her while I stay behind with the multicolored crane display.

  Grandma looks the same as when I saw her at New Year’s. Only now her hair is a uniform chestnut brown. In December, she had patches of gray, like a worn clapboard whose paint was peeling. The entire barn has now been repainted, yet it looks a bit odd, fake. I almost prefer the worn clapboard.

  Her mouth seems different, too. Grandma has heavy lines that extend below the two ends of her disappearing lips, making the bottom of her face look a little like a marionette’s. But today she has drawn fat lips onto her flat mouth, a crimson butterfly.

  “You’re here,” she says. “Hungry?”

  Bedtime for An-jay

  I am taking a bite of my chicken teriyaki when I hear Grandma whispering to Aunt Janet in the corner of the kitchen. “Where did she go?”

  “Something about the bank.”

  “Good, good.”

  Grandma’s voice is strange, like she’s an FBI agent.

  I hear the front door open and shut and expect to feel the frenetic birdlike energy of my mother. Instead, it is the graceful movement of Gramps. He comes from behind and squeezes my shoulders. “An-jay, you’re still skin and bones.”

  I laugh when I hear Gramps’s voice. I’m actually not that skinny compared to the stick girls at school, but I don’t correct him.

  “You smell like flowers,” I say. I swish some chicken in the sauce at the bottom of the Styrofoam container.

  “So what’s going on? Your mom causing havoc as usual?” Gramps has permanent lines on his forehead, only made deeper when he smiles.

  “She’s not here.”

  “She’s not?”

  Gramps then disappears through the swinging doors of the kitchen. Those doors remind me of an old-time Western saloon in the cowboy movies Gramps likes to watch.

  Mom reappears about thirty minutes later. After hugging Gramps, she sits with Grandma at the dining room table, papers in hand. It’s odd for them to get along so well, and I’m suspicious.

  Aunt Janet escapes to the 1001-cranes room while Gramps and I sit in the overstuffed living room, watching a rerun of a TV crime show and sucking on Funyuns, fake onion rings from a bag. Before the cops arrive on the scene, Gramps is fast asleep.

  During the quiet parts of the show, I hear Grandma talking to Mom. “Get a lawyer,” she says.

  “I am a lawyer.”

  “You know what I’m saying. Get one who specializes.”

  A commercial comes on and I can’t hear Mom’s response.

  They start talking about numbers, bank accounts, and withdrawals. I think I hear Mom cursing Dad a few times. Later on, they begin talking about me.

  “She’s still doing well in English—I mean, she’s always doing well in English. But she almost failed math. She used to be good in math. And social studies, too. I’m thinking that it might be her friends.”

  “Don’t worry,” Grandma says. “We’ll straighten her out.”

  I don’t like the words or the tone of their voices. Grandma is talking about me as if I am a crooked hanger or a crumpled-up piece of paper. And what is Mom saying?

  She’s the one, after all, who thinks that everything about my grandparents and Aunt Janet is old and stale. Janet is still best friends with her best friends from high school, Mom says, laughing. It’s only a matter of time before grocery stores and big warehouse stores kill my Gramps’s flower business. Dead-end business, my mother says. Dead-end lives.

  But in spite of what she says and thinks, she is still going to leave me here with Aunt Janet, Grandma, and Gramps. And the 1001 cranes, for better or worse.

  When the TV episode ends and the news comes on, Gramps shifts in his easy chair and finally stands up.

  “Bedtime for An-jay,” he declares, and then retrieves a couple of pillows from the linen closet.

  We open up a sleeping bag, musty and fishy-smelling from a camping trip that was decades ago, but somehow that smell comforts me. The inside lining has rows of elk and rabbits grazing in a forest by a lake. I imagine that the scene is somewhere in northern California, and try to tell myself that Dad has changed his mind and decided not to move out after all. After I tuck myself into the sleeping bag on the floor, Gramps puts up his hand—it’s not even a wave, really—and disappears into the hallway to his bedroom.

  It is almost an hour later when I hear Mom saying good night to Grandma. Mom snaps off the light and then stumbles over to the couch. I stir so that she’ll know I am still awake.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asks.

  “Feels strange in here.”

  She struggles with the zipper of her sleeping bag, which Gramps and I laid out on the couch, and finally gets in, not even bothering to take off her jeans.

  “It won’t be so bad,” she finally says. “I’ll come down as much as I can.”

  “How about Dad?”

  “Angie, please, not that again.”

  “You mean, I won’t get
to see him the whole summer?”

  “He’ll call you. Probably every day, even.”

  “He didn’t call today.”

  “Well, today doesn’t count, because you saw him this morning.”

  He was in his favorite pair of torn Stanford sweatpants, which he wears to bed every night. He hugged me hard and tousled my hair. His unshaved face felt like sandpaper against my cheek. He’s not like those Asian men with thin rattail mustaches; he can grow a full beard in a matter of days. “Don’t cause any trouble down there in L.A. And remember: no monku.”

  He said the stuff about monku as our special code, I realize deep down inside. No matter how surrounded I would be by Inuis, I was still a Kato, he was reminding me.

  “It’s going to go by so quickly, Angie. The summer’s going to be over before you know it,” Mom says. Then she turns onto her side, her back toward me. The streetlight outside bleeds a thin line of silver onto the wall above the drapes, and I see the outline of Mom’s narrow shoulders, first tight and still, and then rising and falling, ever so slightly, matching the beat of her breath.

  Poisoned Phone

  She’s ready to go when I wake up the next morning. Seeing her freshly washed hair and her car keys in her hand makes me feel desperately lonely.

  “It’s just for the summer,” she reminds me again. “It’ll be best. For everyone. Really.”

  I now feel like kicking and screaming and telling my mom not to leave me here. But instead I nod as Gramps, Grandma, and Aunt Janet stand by the door.

  I have been taught well. No monku. I stand in front of my mother and let her briefly embrace me, her chin cutting into the soft fold of my neck.

  “I have something for you,” she then says, revealing a red cell phone in her hand. “An early birthday present.” It’s as shiny as a fresh candy apple. I don’t like red. My mother knows that. She must have bought the phone in a hurry. Or else she wasn’t thinking.

  “I’ve already programmed my cell phone number. And your father’s.” Two different numbers, two separate lives.