Here and there, vacant lots reminded a passerby that war had touched this place. Almost all the houses that had stood on those lots were gone, scavenged for wood and anything else people thought they could use. More often than not, neighbors to either side kept grass and shrubbery from running wild.
Mynah birds eyed Kenzo suspiciously as he turned up a curving street not much different from others in the neighborhood. Before December 7, zebra doves would have puttered along the sidewalk, but people were eating them even faster than they bred. Mynahs, at least, had the sense to be suspicious.
Kenzo walked up a neatly kept entryway to a clapboard house much like its neighbors-a palace compared to the cramped flat where he’d grown up. He knocked on the door. A middle-aged blond woman opened it. “Hello, Mrs. Sundberg,” he said.
She smiled at him-a slightly nervous smile, but a smile even so. “Hello, Ken,” she answered. “Come on in.” Everyone in school had called him Ken. All haoles everywhere did. His older brother was Hank to them, not Hiroshi. Most Hawaii-born Japanese had an American name to go with the one they’d been given at birth. Except when he was with his father, Kenzo still thought of himself as Ken more often than not. Some local Japanese, though, had dropped those American names like live grenades after Hawaii changed hands.
When Kenzo did walk inside, the New England feel only got stronger. The overstuffed furniture, the Currier and Ives prints on the walls, and the bricabrac everywhere didn’t go with the palm trees and balmy breezes outside. He handed Mrs. Sundberg the sack. “I brought you this,” he said, as casually as he could.
She hefted it, then looked inside. Plainly, she didn’t want to, not right there in front of him. Just as plainly, she couldn’t help herself. She was smiling even before she closed the sack. “Thank you very much, Ken,” she said. “That’s one of the nicest dolphins I’ve seen in a long time.”
Kenzo thought the name a lot of haoles used for mahi-mahi was dumb. It confused the fish with porpoises’ cousins. Telling that to Mrs. Sundberg would have been wasting his breath. He just said, “I hope you like it when you cook it up.”
“I’m sure we will.” Mrs. Sundberg sounded as if she meant every word of that. No wonder-people who weren’t fishermen or didn’t know fishermen never got fish like that, not these days. She went on, “Let me go put it in the icebox. Elsie will be out in a minute.”
“Sure,” Kenzo said, and he didn’t smile till Mrs. Sundberg had turned her back. Bringing a good-sized fish every time he came to call on Elsie wasn’t quite a bribe, but it did go a long way toward making her folks happier to see him. The way to their hearts is through their stomachs, he thought. It was no joke, either, not when so many stomachs in Hawaii were growling so loud these days.
Mrs. Sundberg came out with a glass it her hand. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ken said again. “Thanks.” He sipped. It was good. Lemonade persisted where so many things had vanished. Hawaii still grew sugar, even if a lot of the cane fields had been turned into rice paddies since the occupation. And the Sundbergs had a lemon tree in their back yard. What else could you do with lemons but fix lemonade?
“Hi, Ken.” Elsie walked into the living room from the back of the house.
“Hi.” He could feel his face lighting up when he smiled. He’d known Elsie since they were in elementary school together. They’d been friends and helped each other with homework in high school. She was a nice-looking blonde-not gorgeous, but nice. (She looked a lot like her mother, in fact, though Kenzo never noticed that.) Before the war, she’d been a tiny bit plump. Hardly anybody was plump any more. A double chin now marked not just a collaborator but an important collaborator.
“I’ll be right back,” Elsie’s mom said. And she was, too, before Kenzo and Elsie could do anything more than smile at each other. “Here you are, sweetie.” She gave Elsie a glass of lemonade, too.
The longer Elsie and Kenzo stood around drinking lemonade and gabbing with Mrs. Sundberg, the less time they would have by themselves. Elsie’s mother didn’t say that was what she had in mind, but she didn’t have to. Calling her on it would have been rude. Instead, Kenzo and Elsie just drank fast. Elsie handed back her empty glass in nothing flat. “We’ll be off now, Mom.”
“Have a nice time,” Mrs. Sundberg said gamely.
Elsie didn’t giggle till they were out of the house. She reached for Kenzo’s hand before he would have reached for hers, before they’d even got to the sidewalk. “My mother,” she said, exasperation and affection mingling in her voice.
“She’s very nice.” Kenzo knew better than to criticize Mrs. Sundberg. That was Elsie’s job. If he did it, he might make Elsie stick up for her, which was the last thing he wanted. He picked something safer to say: “How have you been?”
“We’re… getting along, one day at a time.” Elsie disappointed him by taking that as a question about her whole family, but he couldn’t do anything except squeeze her hand a little. She went on, “We trade lemons and avocados for whatever we can get to add to the ration. Mom’s always glad when you bring a fish.”
“I knew that. It’s not like she doesn’t show it,” Kenzo said. Yes, for him praise was safer than blame. If he didn’t bring something good whenever he called on Elsie, how would Mrs. Sundberg look at him? As nothing but a damn Jap? That was his bet.
They walked to the park at the corner of Wilder and Keeaumoku. It hadn’t been maintained the way most of the lawns had. The grass was tall and shaggy. Weeds and shrubs sprouted here and there. The seat had come off one of the swings; only slightly rusty chains hung down from the bar.
But it was peaceful and quiet, and a place where Japanese soldiers were unlikely to come. Elsie didn’t like being around them, and Kenzo didn’t see how he could blame her. Some of the things he’d heard… He didn’t want to think about that, or about not being able to protect her if trouble started.
White paint was starting to peel off the benches in the park. In peacetime, somebody would have fixed that up quick as you please. These days, the Honolulu city government, or what was left of it, had more urgent things to worry about. Most of them revolved around trying to persuade the occupiers to be a little less savage, a little less ruthless, than they might have been otherwise.
A bench creaked when Kenzo and Elsie sat down on it. That wouldn’t have been allowed to happen in better times, either. One of these days, if things didn’t get better, somebody would sit down on it and fall right through when rotting wood gave way. It might not take that long, either. Hawaii was tropical. If things weren’t tended, they went to pieces pretty damn quick.
“How are you?” Kenzo asked again, this time bearing down on the last word.
“I don’t even know any more,” Elsie answered. “I was so disappointed when we lost those carriers, I don’t know how to tell you.”
“You don’t need to. So was I,” Kenzo said.
“I know. But…” Elsie paused, figuring out how to say what she wanted to say without getting him mad. She was considerate enough to do that, which was one of the reasons he liked her. Finally, she said, “Nobody can tell by looking that you don’t like the people who’re in charge now. With me, it’s different.” She patted her short blond hair.
Kenzo’s laugh was as sour as the lemonade would have been without sugar. “Anybody who looks like me would have said the same thing before December 7.”
“I didn’t really understand it then. Now I do.” Elsie’s smile only lifted one corner of her mouth. “Nothing like wearing the shoe to show how much it pinches, I guess.”
“No.” Now Kenzo hesitated for a moment before he decided to add, “There are haole collaborators, too, you know.”