Cynthia Kadohata: The Thing About Luck

Kouun is “good luck” in Japanese, and one year my family had none of it. We were cursed with bad luck. Bad luck chased us around, pointing her bony finger. We got seven flat tires in six weeks. I got malaria, one of fifteen hundred cases in the United States that year. And my grandmother’s spine started causing her excruciating pain.

Furthermore, random bad smells emanated from we knew not where. And my brother, Jaz, became cursed with invisibility. Nobody noticed him except us. His best friend had moved away, and he did not know a single boy to hang around with. Even our cousins looked the other way when they saw him at our annual Christmas party. They didn’t even seem to be snubbing my brother; they just didn’t see him.

The thing about luck is that it’s like a fever. You can take fever meds and lie in bed and drink chicken broth and sleep seventeen hours in a row, but basically your fever will break when it wants to break.

In early April my parents got a call from Japan. Three elderly relatives were getting ready to die and wanted my parents to take care of them in their last weeks and months. There was nothing surprising about this. This was just the way our year was going. It was April 25 when my grandparents and Jaz delivered my parents to the airport to catch their plane to Japan. I stayed at home because the type of malaria I’d gotten was called “airport malaria.” Airport malaria is when a rogue mosquito from, say, Africa has been inadvertently carried into the United States on a jet. This infected mosquito might bite you. I got bit in Florida last summer, and I lived in Kansas. The chances that I would get malaria from going to the airport in Kansas were remote, but I’d grown so scared of mosquitoes that sometimes I didn’t even like stepping outside. It really wasn’t fair—I was only twelve, and yet already I was scared of the entire outside world.

During the 1940s there were thousands of malaria cases in the United States. Then in the fifties the experts thought malaria here was eradicated. But every so often, someone still caught it. Sometimes you would get your picture in the newspaper. My picture was even in Time magazine!

Obaachan and Jiichan, my grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side, were both sixty-seven and lived with us in Littlefield, Kansas. “Obaachan” was more formal than “Baachan,” but it was what she wanted Jaz and me to call her.

When harvest season arrived in May of our horrible year, Jiichan planned to come out of retirement to work as a combine driver for a custom harvesting company called Parker Harvesting, Inc. (I’ll explain about custom harvesting in a minute or two.) My grandmother would work as a cook for the same harvester, with me as her helper.

We’d all worked for the Parkers before. But it was the first time my parents wouldn’t be there, which meant only my grandparents would be paying the mortgage during harvest this year. I didn’t quite understand what “paying the mortgage” meant, but apparently, it was a constant struggle. Another phrase that came up a lot was “paying down the principal,” as in, “If we could just pay down the principal, I’d feel like we were getting somewhere.” I used to think that “paying down the principal” meant they wanted to bribe the principal at one of my future schools, like they would give this principal some money, and then someday the principal would let me into high school despite my iffy grades.

Anyway. As soon as my grandparents got home from dropping off my parents, changes were implemented. My mother had told Jaz, “Don’t worry. You’ll make a friend when you least expect it.” My grandparents were more proactive. It seems Obaachan and Jiichan had a bright idea they’d been hiding from us.

Obaachan made Jaz and me sit on the floor in front of the coffee table while she and Jiichan sat on the couch. “We having meeting-party,” she announced regally. “We invite boys we will consider for friendship with Jaz.” She turned to me. “Make list with him. I no interfere.”

“A list of people to invite?” I asked. My Doberman, Thunder, tried to push himself between me and the table. I pushed back, and we just sat there, leaning hard into each other.

“No! A list!” she snapped at me.

Wasn’t that what I had just said? I finally got up and moved to a different side of the table. Still unsure what she wanted, I got a pen and paper.

“Pencil! You may need to erase.”

I got a pencil and readied myself. “Should I number the list?” I asked.

My grandfather nodded sagely. “Agenda,” he said. “List for boys we invite, agenda for party.”

“No interfere!” Obaachan said to Jiichan.

“You interfere first!”

“No!”

Obaachan and Jiichan had been married for forty-nine years, and my mother always said that after that number of years, you no longer had to be polite all the time. It sometimes seemed that in our house, I was the only one who had to use my manners. Jaz didn’t have to because he had issues. When I’m sixty-seven, in fifty-five years, I supposed that I would finally be able to dispense with my manners.

I thought Jiichan and Obaachan talked to each other the way that they did because they’d had an arranged marriage. Obaachan said that if I had an arranged marriage, I would never give or receive a broken heart. If I grew up beautiful, I would never break any man’s heart, and if I grew up plain, nobody would break my heart. If I rebelled and wanted love, however, all bets were off. Broken hearts would come my way like locusts.

“Summer! You in rah-rah land.” She never said “la-la land,” and I never corrected her.

I hurriedly wrote Number one on the paper in the left-hand margin.

“No number,” Obaachan said. “Arrange by time. I have to tell you everything?”

Jiichan picked up the paper, studied the Number one , and set the paper back down. “I agree. Arrange by time.”

I erased the Number one and wrote in One o’clock p.m. I made sure not to flick the eraser bits onto the floor, because if I did, Obaachan would be so upset that she might fall over dead.

“Noon!” barked Obaachan. I made the change. “Continue. First write day on top of paper in big letter. Day for meeting is next Saturday. Then continue.”

“What would you like to do at noon?” I asked Jaz.

“Play with LEGOs. I want a LEGO party.”

“Not really party,” Jiichan said. He was cleaning his teeth with the floss he always carried in his shirt pocket. Sometimes he flossed during dinner, right at the table. See what I mean about manners? Can you imagine what your parents would do if you started to floss at the dinner table? But he constantly seemed to have something between his teeth. “More of meeting than party,” he said.

“Noon lunchtime,” Obaachan said. “You feed boys first. Boys always hungry. Never mind. I no interfere. But no food, no friend. What I just say?”

“No food, no friend,” Jaz and I repeated. Obaachan sometimes made us repeat something she had just said, to prove we were listening.

Jaz turned to Obaachan. “Obaachan, will you make sandwiches?”

“Summer make. I her mentor.”

I found myself already starting to feel stressed. What if I made ham sandwiches and the boys wanted tuna fish? What if I used regular bread and one of the boys needed gluten-free, like my friend Alyssa had to eat because of her allergies? What if I used too much mayonnaise? Arghhh!