every newcomer’s first visit to the house, the moment Patty had learned to dread so much that eventually she’d stopped bringing friends home at all.
Patty let her gaze follow Torre’s, and tried to see what he saw, from his perspective—the gruesome tableau was as familiar to her as her mother’s Corelle dish pattern or the fake-brick design of the kitchen linoleum.
All those eyes: wide and shiny, staring into every corner of the room at once. It probably seemed like there were dozens of them, but in reality there were only six or eight animals—squirrels and chipmunks and a pale little desert mouse, all of them stuffed and mounted so that they seemed to perch at the edge of the shelf, tiny claws curled around the edges of the painted board, hunching and crouching and tensed to jump, mouths open and leering, like so many gargoyles about to come to life.
3
Los Angeles
December 1941
Every day when the noon bell rang, it was the lunch monitor’s job to stand at the front of the class and choose rows of students to line up, the quietest and most attentive first.
The teacher, for whom the ritual had lost some of its appeal over time—understandably, because she was at least a hundred years old—attended to her own tasks: gathering her purse and her lunch in its wicker pail, removing her glasses and placing them in the desk drawer, straightening stacks of papers. Unless the lunch monitor was utterly devoid of any sense of drama, she would drag out the selection, taking her time surveying the rows of eighth graders, and only after building sufficient suspense would she announce her choice.
Row three, you may line up.
And then the process would be repeated until everyone had lined up for lunch.
Each Monday morning, new recess and lunch monitors took up the yoke of duty, the schedule having been posted the first day of school. Lucy had waited more than three months for her turn. She had asked her mother to press her best blouse, the one with the tiny pleated ruffles around the Peter Pan collar. She had worn her favorite headband, the navy velvet with the small folded bow, and new snow-white socks. Lucy looked her best this Monday morning, and because she was Lucy Takeda, that meant she looked splendid indeed.
All through the morning she waited impatiently, forcing herself not to slouch in her seat. At last it was nearly noon. The teacher glanced up at the clock, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucy. She did not smile. Instead she closed her eyes and pinched the flabby skin between her eyebrows, frowning as though she had a headache. Then she opened her planner and ran her finger down the page. “The new hall monitor this week shall be Samuel McGinnis,” she said without inflection. “The new lunch monitor shall be Nancy Marks.”
For a second, Lucy was sure that she had heard wrong, that the teacher had made a mistake. Lucy had certainly not made a mistake—the date had been circled on the calendar at home for months.
Nancy Marks turned in her seat and gawped at Lucy, but she scrambled to her feet when the teacher snapped that she didn’t have all day. It seemed that Nancy’s voice held a note of apology as she chose Lucy’s row to go first, but as the students filed to the front of the room, Nancy did not look at her.
* * *
“It’s because you’re a Jap,” Yvonne Graziano said, not without sympathy. Yvonne and Lucy had been best friends since second grade. They huddled in the corner of the playground under an arbor covered with the canes of climbing roses gone dormant for the winter. Lucy had learned not to stand too close, or her angora coat would get stuck on the thorns.
Yvonne spoke with authority, since her eldest brother was in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at March Field, but Yvonne’s mother was worried that he would be sent to the front lines as soon as the United States entered the war.
“My dad says if there was ever a war with Japan, he’d sign up if they let him,” Lucy said, fighting back tears. She’d managed to stay proud and aloof all through lunch, though she had little appetite for the boiled egg and apple her mother had packed. “He says he’d go fight if he could.”
Yvonne nodded sympathetically. “My dad says your dad is one of the good ones. But he’s too old.”