being true to Codie.
I trudge through the sloppy waves and the ocean is cool against my overheated calves, thighs, belly. I slide forward and the water gently lofts me up. It looks like molten metal around me, a silver syrup streaming ripples in a wide V from where it parts at the tips of my outstretched fingers as I breaststroke toward the moon.
I swim until I can’t take another stroke, flop over onto my back, and let the sea rock me to a lullaby rhythm. During the day, looking down from high atop the black cliffs, this shallow part I’m bobbing above now is a collar of pastel blues and greens ringing the island. At the point where the coral reef wrapping around the island drops down as steeply as the cliffs at my back, the color abruptly changes from soft tropical shades to a midnight blue that’s black at the deepest spots. That’s my destination.
I flip back over and continue on. I know I’ve reached the outer reef of dark blue when the water grows chilly. Beneath me now are hundreds of feet of sea snakes, moray eels, sharks, and grouper big as bears. Ahead is the East China Sea, then China, South and North Korea. Behind me, out beyond Okinawa, is the Pacific Ocean all the way to Codie’s cove where the mama green sea turtle swims.
I glance back. In the misty fog the island looks like a place out of a fairy tale. An imaginary land that would vanish entirely if I asked why I, why any of us Americans, were there. A fairy tale that my mother and grandmother invented so we’d all have the comforting illusion that we belonged someplace.
That lie was pretty much blasted to smithereens by three phone calls not too long after we arrived on the island but before the chaplains came. When the first call came and I heard my mom resurrect her halting Japanese, which she’d barely spoken since my grandma died, I knew she was talking to the Okinawan relatives I’d heard so much about. I was excited and asked her when we were going to meet them. But, even though Mom and I were still talking then, she wouldn’t give me any details. She said her Japanese was rusty and she couldn’t understand what they were saying, and obviously they didn’t understand what she was telling them, but that she’d try again.
The second call was short and tense. It left my mom bristling worse than a rottweiler about to attack, and I knew better than to ask herabout it. The third call was loud. Apparently her Japanese had come unrusted, because she was screaming like a Green Bay Packers fan in the language I hadn’t heard her use since my grandma died. I never even had a chance
not
to ask about that conversation, because she left right after it, went to the NCO club, and must have made a new friend, since she didn’t drag herself back to the Shogun Inn until dawn. Later that morning, a Saturday, a letter arrived.
It wasn’t the normal kind of letter that came through the air force’s APO system that you had to pick up at the base post office. It was local, and a messenger—an Okinawan girl who rode up on a moped and had some sort of special badge clipped to the pocket of her blue blouse that allowed her to get on base—delivered it. She wouldn’t give it to me and I had the extremely unpleasant duty of waking my mother so that the delivery girl could bow and hold the letter out to her on the palms of both upturned hands as if it were a sacred offering.
Pausing only to grab her pocket Japanese dictionary, Mom took the letter into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and switched on the fan, which let me know that she was smoking the cigarettes she swore she was going to give up when we got here. An hour later, she came out smelling like a bar at two in the morning and refused to tell me what was in the letter. All I knew was that after it was delivered, the phone calls in Japanese and the talk about the Okinawan relatives who were going to open their hearts and homes to us stopped dead. A few days later, the chaplains knocked on our
I trudge through the sloppy waves and the ocean is cool against my overheated calves, thighs, belly. I slide forward and the water gently lofts me up. It looks like molten metal around me, a silver syrup streaming ripples in a wide V from where it parts at the tips of my outstretched fingers as I breaststroke toward the moon.
I swim until I can’t take another stroke, flop over onto my back, and let the sea rock me to a lullaby rhythm. During the day, looking down from high atop the black cliffs, this shallow part I’m bobbing above now is a collar of pastel blues and greens ringing the island. At the point where the coral reef wrapping around the island drops down as steeply as the cliffs at my back, the color abruptly changes from soft tropical shades to a midnight blue that’s black at the deepest spots. That’s my destination.
I flip back over and continue on. I know I’ve reached the outer reef of dark blue when the water grows chilly. Beneath me now are hundreds of feet of sea snakes, moray eels, sharks, and grouper big as bears. Ahead is the East China Sea, then China, South and North Korea. Behind me, out beyond Okinawa, is the Pacific Ocean all the way to Codie’s cove where the mama green sea turtle swims.
I glance back. In the misty fog the island looks like a place out of a fairy tale. An imaginary land that would vanish entirely if I asked why I, why any of us Americans, were there. A fairy tale that my mother and grandmother invented so we’d all have the comforting illusion that we belonged someplace.
That lie was pretty much blasted to smithereens by three phone calls not too long after we arrived on the island but before the chaplains came. When the first call came and I heard my mom resurrect her halting Japanese, which she’d barely spoken since my grandma died, I knew she was talking to the Okinawan relatives I’d heard so much about. I was excited and asked her when we were going to meet them. But, even though Mom and I were still talking then, she wouldn’t give me any details. She said her Japanese was rusty and she couldn’t understand what they were saying, and obviously they didn’t understand what she was telling them, but that she’d try again.
The second call was short and tense. It left my mom bristling worse than a rottweiler about to attack, and I knew better than to ask herabout it. The third call was loud. Apparently her Japanese had come unrusted, because she was screaming like a Green Bay Packers fan in the language I hadn’t heard her use since my grandma died. I never even had a chance
not
to ask about that conversation, because she left right after it, went to the NCO club, and must have made a new friend, since she didn’t drag herself back to the Shogun Inn until dawn. Later that morning, a Saturday, a letter arrived.
It wasn’t the normal kind of letter that came through the air force’s APO system that you had to pick up at the base post office. It was local, and a messenger—an Okinawan girl who rode up on a moped and had some sort of special badge clipped to the pocket of her blue blouse that allowed her to get on base—delivered it. She wouldn’t give it to me and I had the extremely unpleasant duty of waking my mother so that the delivery girl could bow and hold the letter out to her on the palms of both upturned hands as if it were a sacred offering.
Pausing only to grab her pocket Japanese dictionary, Mom took the letter into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and switched on the fan, which let me know that she was smoking the cigarettes she swore she was going to give up when we got here. An hour later, she came out smelling like a bar at two in the morning and refused to tell me what was in the letter. All I knew was that after it was delivered, the phone calls in Japanese and the talk about the Okinawan relatives who were going to open their hearts and homes to us stopped dead. A few days later, the chaplains knocked on our
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