Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

“It was after the raid on Tokyo. We children were told to collect scraps of cloth. Anything we could find. We picked over the countryside; we stripped the scarecrows. I remember this remnant from my sister’s obi. Red silk suns bounced like balls. And these patches were quilted together by the women in the prefecture. The seams were waxed as if to make the stitches rainproof. Instead they held air, gases, and the rags billowed out into balloons, the heavy heads of chrysanthemums. The balloons bobbed as the soldiers attached the bombs. And then they rose up to the high wind, so many, like planets, heading into the rising sun and America….”

I had stopped translating before he reached this point. I let his words fly away. It was a luncheon meeting. I looked down at the tables. The white napkins looked like mountain peaks of a range hung with clouds. We were high above them on the stage. I am yonsei , the fourth American generation. Four is an unlucky number in Japan. The old man, the mayor, was trying to say that the world was knit together with threads we could not see, that the wind was a bridge between people. It was a hot day. I told these beat businessmen about children long ago releasing the bright balloons, how they disappeared ages and ages ago. And all of them looked up as if to catch the first sight of the balloons returning to earth, a bright scrap of joy.

Every Wednesday was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked because she was there, week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and bales of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I’d walk her home. She’d hug the dish to her chest. The streetlights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She’d talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it’s everyday and I know it,” she’d say, holding it at arm’s length. “They’re so modern and simple and something we’ll have a long time after we forget about the movies.”

I forget just what happened then. She heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinee. They stopped the movie, and a man came out onstage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn’t finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn’t need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever and we hadn’t known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe, where she’d write to me on lined school paper and never fail to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.

This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafes. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a bit of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.

I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting on bowls as if we were moving the next day.

The green field is covered with these tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger around a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.

I was waiting for the girls to come out of their mother’s trailer so I decided to check the tires with a penny I found on the passenger seat. On the left front, the tread wasn’t deep enough to reach Lincoln’s nose and I could see all the rest were more or less bald. That’s when the girls blew out the trailer door. Their coats were half on and half off. It looked like they had a couple of extra arms each, their hair flying.

I stood up and threw the penny away. As soon as I did it I felt sorry. I wanted the penny back right away and looked for it in the tall brown grass. I looked away from the trailer out into the yard, which was turning all copper as the sun went down. I’d never find it.

It was almost winter again. Straw bales were stuffed around the trailer, hiding the wheels and the hitch. The propane tank was newly painted silver. They paint metal silver. That penny was still somewhere in the grass. The girls were pulling each other’s hair, and I felt the car sink with the weight of them. I felt it sink under my butt where I leaned on the fender and looked over the cornfield newly gleaned next to where the trailer was parked.

“Daddy,” the kids said, “look at us.”

My car is silver. The seats are black. The girls were in the nest of their things in back. Paper, rope, arms from old dolls, clothes, books with gold spines, and bent-up plastic straws. They were already reading.

Their mother followed them out this time. She showed me the paper from the school. She hadn’t read the note until I’d pulled up in the drive when she was getting the girls’ things together. She checked their hair right there while they wormed around in their coats by the door. She combed through the fine hairs behind their ears and in the scruff of their necks and found the ropes of eggs leading down to the scalps and there the lice.

And I stood there a second with her. I thought about the time I let one die overnight on a piece of notebook paper. It clung for hours to a loose hair I put beside it like the grass the girls throw in with lightning bugs. I wanted to see if it was true about needing warm bodies to survive. It was true. And I blew the paper clean.

“We took a nap,” she said. And it took me a while to understand what she meant. We were both leaning on the car. She had her head hanging down. Her arms were straight and her hands were jammed into her sweater pockets. I felt my fingers on her scalp, and I leaned in toward the whirlpool of her hair.

Because I could play baseball, I never went to Korea. I was standing on the dock in San Francisco with my entire company. We all wore helmets, parade rest, and were loaded down with winter and summer gear. We were ready to embark. My name was called. I remember saying excuse me to the men in rank as I tried to get by with my equipment. Then I sat on my duffel and watched the others file aboard, bumping up the side of the ship, the cables flexing. I could see rust in the water being pumped from the bilge. Sailors laughed way over my head. It only took a few hours to load the troop. There were some people there to wave good-bye, though not for the soldiers since our shipping out was something secret.

Nothing was ever said. I was transferred to another unit where all the troops were baseball players. I played second base on the Third Army team. I batted seventh and bunted a lot. We traveled by train from one base to another in Texas, Georgia, and on up into New Jersey for the summer. We had a few cars to ourselves, including a parlor with an open platform. The rest of the train was made up of reefers full of frozen meat. The train was aluminum and streamlined. We could stand in the vestibules or in the open doorway of the baggage car where we kept the bags of bats and balls and the pinstriped uniforms hung on rods and look out over the pink flat deserts. There wouldn’t be a cinder from the engine, its wheels a blur. You would see it up ahead on the slow curves, the white smoke of the whistle trailing back over the silver boxcars of meat and then the whistle. Some cars still had to be iced so we’d stop in sad, little towns, play catch and pepper while the blocks melted in the sun and the sawdust turned dark and clotty on the platform. We’d hit long fly balls to the local kids who’d hang around. We left them broken bats to nail and tape.