Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [14]
Because my father was a junior officer, we didn’t qualify immediately for base housing. Dad had rented a small Japanese version of an American house in Minami Rinkin, a village tucked in a valley near the Atsugi Naval Air Station where he worked, on a road filled with bicycles, oxcarts, and mud. We had a round-faced Japanese cleaning lady—as did all the military families at the time—named Koko-san, who saved my brother’s life after he scooped kerosene from the heater that warmed the living room and drank it, and who taught my sister to speak English—with a Japanese accent that she had until she was a teenager. We would walk with Koko-san into the little town to shop, and when we did, we drew a crowd—that is, if my sister was with us. Jay and I had dark, nearly black hair, and if you looked across a group of Japanese children, you wouldn’t pick us out unless our round blue eyes were fixed on you. But Nancy had sunshine yellow hair, and wherever we went, Japanese children in their school uniforms would follow her like she was the Pied Piper, jostling to be closest to her, reaching their hands out to stroke her unimaginably beautiful hair. Nancy has always been pretty and has always garnered her share of attention, but never again like it was in Minami Rinkin. I’ve often thought that a lesser person than Nancy might have found life to be a disappointment after that opening act.
Dad eventually qualified for on-base housing—a one-story, three-bedroom stucco house that looked like every other one-story, three-bedroom stucco house in the Army housing area at Sagamihara. The houses looked the same on the outside, and they were all the same on the inside. Not just the same floor plan—living room in front, dining room to the left, bedrooms back to the right—but all painted the same, too. In the military, you didn’t choose your wall colors. The military painted the walls an eggshell color, and when you moved out and another family moved in, they painted them eggshell again, and the houses perpetually smelled of fresh paint. We lived there for two years, and Koko-san—now a part of the family—came with us.
Just as we had begun to settle into our lives and I had started first grade at the base school, it was again time for my mother to pack up the house. My father got word he was being stationed back in Jacksonville. I was leaving the fifth house I had lived in during my six years, but that didn’t bother me. I was already used to that. What did bother me was that I was leaving Koko-san. She was plain and sturdy and warm, and Jay, Nancy, and I loved her completely. It was the first time I had to say goodbye to someone I thought—rightly, it turns out—I would never see again. Although my mother had my father to help her cross the Pacific this time, now she had three young crying children, grieving the loss of Koko-san. It may have been an easier crossing than the first, but only marginally so.
When we moved back to Jacksonville, Florida, it was the middle of the 1950s and we were the prototype for the 1950s family. In Japan, we only found out about the changes in American fashion or American music or even American restaurants when magazines—consistently two months late—arrived at the Navy Exchange or when there was a revealing section in the News of the Day reel that preceded each movie at the station theater. The result was that what we thought was fashionable might be unrealistic, as if aliens had dressed for school by looking at old Vogue magazines and what the First Lady was wearing as she greeted a visiting head of state. That’s how it came to be that the Anania family arrived at the first community picnic at the Naval Air Station Jacksonville in matching outfits. My mother had gotten some blue and white Japanese cotton, and