Slightly Far East

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Moyer, Kermit

It's the Sunday evening before the first day of school. The year is 1956, and I'm going into the eighth grade, my sister Janet into the fifth, but at the moment we're sitting with our parents out on the terrace of the Officers' Club, a horizontal wedge of concrete and stone that juts out from the side of a mountain and dominates the neat checkerboard of cultivated fields and rice paddies below like some gigantic machine-gun bunker left over from the war. A small band of Okinawan musicians, incongruously dressed in white sport coats and pink bow ties, are playing songs I recognize from "Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade" back home while, behind them, the setting sun is turning the sky the same color as my mother's strawberry daiquiri.

She's sitting next to me, swaying in her chair and moving her shoulders to the beat in that fluid, disconcerting way she has. It's her second daiquiri and I'm hoping it will be her last. A natural performer and a Rita Hayworth look-alike, who more than once has actually been mistaken for the movie actress (a resemblance she purposely encourages), she attracts enough attention when she's perfectly sober; but when she gets what she calls "tipsy" (other people get "tight"-she gets "tipsy"), she likes to play the vamp in a way that makes me cringe with embarrassment. She no sooner sits down and takes one of the Pall Malls from her red leather cigarette case than a young crewcut waiter is there to light it for her. "Why, thank you, kind sir," she says, touching his wrist as she leans into the trembling flame. When she bestows one of her patented smiles on him, his ears go from pink to purple, but she's already turning away. She picks a flake of tobacco from her tongue and sits with her back straight and her elbow propped on the table, absent-mindedly weaving the thread of smoke that rises from her cigarette back and forth in time to the music.

The bandleader, who doubles as the vocalist, is a small, nimble man with a mobile face and dark, bristly hair. We're sitting close to the bandstand, and when he notices that my mother is softly singing the words along with him, he brings the microphone to our table and invites her to join in: "Did you say I've got a lot to learn T they sing. Then he holds the mike for her, and she makes her eyes big and sings to him-''Please don't think I'm trying not to learn"-and then he sings to her-"Since this is the perfect spot to learn"-and she again to him-"Teach me to-ni-ight." It's like an impromptu back-and-forth duet between lovers, all the more realistic for being unrehearsed and spontaneous. I can't believe how sincere my mother sounds.

Through the whole thing, my father leans back in his chair, his ankle propped on his knee, and beams. When they come to the end, there's scattered applause and smiles from the people at the other tables, and my father leans over and says, "That was lovely, honey, really lovely." Janet has been distracted from the maraschino cherry she's trying to fish out of her Shirley Temple just long enough to clap. I'm apparently the only one the performance has made uncomfortable. But I still have to agree with my father when he turns to me and says, "She's a pip, isn't she?," even though I couldn't tell you exactly what a "pip" is.

That evening, as we drive home from the Officers' Club through the stunted and odoriferous countryside, it begins to rain, and later that night, while raindrops slap against the broad elephant-ear fronds that grow outside my bedroom window, I lie in my bed unable to sleep and imagine that what I'm hearing is the slap of bare feet on our terrazzo floor as a gang of notorious "slickie boys" goes about quietly robbing us of everything we own. Our raw, new suburban-style subdivision is surrounded by a tenfoot-high chainlink fence with strands of barbed wire tilted outward at the top to discourage these legendarily silent teams of thieves who, it is said, can strip your house bare while you sleep undisturbed. But gradually, the wet, smacking sound of the imaginary slickie boys gives way to something else, something that no doubt because I'm hearing it for the first time doesn't register immediately. But then, all at once, it does: the bumping, moaning, increasingly urgent bed-squeaking sound of my mother and father on the other side of the bedroom wall. No matter how tightly I cover my ears and hum into my pillow, it's too late to get the sound out of my head. I have a flash of panic that I might get involuntarily excited, and when I don't, I worry that maybe I should. I'm so churned-up with feelings that at first I don't even notice that the song I'm humming is "Teach Me Tonight."

My new school turns out to be a village of Quonset huts-more like a military encampment than a high school. The Quonset huts' rounded shapes make me think of covered wagons out on the Western plains, as if we've circled our classrooms to ward off an Indian attack. Except that instead of being in Monument Valley somewhere, these classrooms are in a gravelly field at the foot of a low mountain terraced with rice paddies, and just across a two-lane highway is the rocky shoreline of the East China Sea. Which, maybe because of its exotic name, is sort of a letdown, at least the first time I see it from my school bus window, where it's nothing but a sliver of uninviting gunmetal gray under a hazy, perfectly flat horizon.