When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Page B

whine.
He knew which restaurants would serve them lunch and which would not. He knew which barbers would cut their kind of hair.
The best ones, of course.
The thing that he loved most about America, he once confided to the boy, was the glazed jelly donut.
Can’t be beat.
    HIS MOTHER SAID it aged you. The sun. She said it made you grow old. Every night before she went to bed she daubed cream on her face. She rationed it out as though it were butter. Or sugar. It was Pond’s. She’d bought a large jar at the pharmacy the day before they had left Berkeley. “Got to make it last,” she said. But already she had almost used it all up. “I should have planned ahead,” she said. “I should have bought two.”
    â€œMaybe three,” said the boy.
    She stood in front of the mirror tracing the lines along her forehead and neck with her finger. “Is it the light,” she asked, “or are there bags under my eyes?”
    â€œThere’s bags.”
    She pointed to a wrinkle by her mouth. “See this?”
    He nodded.
    â€œA recent development. Your father won’t know who I am.”
    â€œI’ll remind him.”
    â€œTell him . . .” she said, and then her voice drifted off, and she was somewhere far away, and outside a hot dry wind was blowing up from the south and across the high desert plains.
    ALWAYS, HE WOULD REMEMBER the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. Only the alkaline made your skin burn. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting. It took your voice away. The dust got into your shoes. Your hair. Your pants. Your mouth. Your bed.
    Your dreams.
    It seeped under doors and around the edges of windows and through the cracks in the walls.
    And all day long, it seemed, his mother was always sweeping. Once in a while she would put down her broom and look at him. “What I wouldn’t give,” she’d say, “for my Electrolux.”
    One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.
    By morning his name was gone.
    HIS FATHER used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You’re my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy’s short black hair. “Hush, Puppy,” he whispered, “it’s all right. Here I am.”
    AT DUSK the sky turned blood red and his sister took him out walking along the outer edge of the barracks to watch the sun go down over the mountains. “Look. Look away. Look. Look away.” That, she told him, was the proper way to look at the sun. If you stared at it straight on for too long, you’d go blind.
    In the darkening red twilight they would point out to each other the things that they saw: a dog chasing a porcupine, a tiny pink seashell, the husk of a beetle, a column of fire ants marching across the sand. If they were lucky they might see the Portuguese lady strolling along the fence with her husband, Sakamoto, or the lady with the white turban—she’d lost all her hair, they’d heard, overnight on the train—or the man with the withered arm who lived in Block 7. If they were very lucky, the man with the withered arm might even raise it—the arm—and wave to them.
    ONE EVENING, while they were walking, the boy reached over and grabbed the girl’s arm. “What is it?” she asked him.
    He tapped his wrist. “Time,” he said. “What time?”
    She stopped and looked at her watch as though she had never seen it before. “It’s six o’clock,” she said.
    Her watch had said six o’clock for weeks. She had stopped winding it the day they had stepped off the train.
    â€œWhat do you think