Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [18]
“All my life,” I started, “I have wanted to come to Green Bay.” I told them about Edna Defenderfer and how she had shared Green Bay with a room full of nine-year-olds, forty-five years before, and how I knew that if she loved Green Bay, I loved Green Bay. When I stepped down from speaking, a man came up to me and said that Mrs. Defenderfer had been his teacher in Green Bay, and he knew her daughter. That night, I spoke to her daughter, and the next day, I spoke to Mrs. Defenderfer herself, then in a nursing home, and listened to her recount moments in that classroom decades and continents away. She remembered me as “Mary Beth”—the name by which I was known until college. All the affection I felt at nine came flooding back, and—honestly—it comes flooding back now, as I type.
That classroom was magical to me, and although the building is no longer there—on the Internet I have seen the sparkling school that replaced it—in my mind I can walk through that old school. Our room was second on the right down the main hall, and I sat in the second row, midway back, and listened to the best teacher I ever had.
I had junior choir and Girl Scouts. My brother, Jay, had the baseball field, and my sister, Nancy, had her bicycle and then, when the hula hoop hit Japan, she had that. She’d walk to school spinning a hula hoop around her waist, stopping traffic as she stepped down from the curb, spinning and talking to friends. She would turn and wave to Mother without slowing the hoop’s speed.
It always amazes me that such different children can grow up in precisely the same soil. My mother found the perfect way to describe the differences when she wrote to her mother, “From now until eight tonight I lose all personal identity—I’m Mary Beth’s ‘Mother’—very dignified—Nancy’s ‘Mommie,’ and, since last week—horrors—I’m Jay’s ‘Mama Guitar.’” Different as we were then, and are now, what binds us is family and years of being each other’s most constant friends—and, until we were adults, each other’s most constant enemies as well.
The summer that I was between fourth and fifth grades, we had a base-wide war between the boys and the girls. We were all enemies. There were no malls, and there was no television—unless you wanted to watch sumo wrestling or I Love Lucy in Japanese (which, frankly, everyone should see at least once, just to hear Ricky Ricardo dubbed in Japanese). So fifty military children of all ages did what you might expect: we waged a war. My parents had had a piece of furniture delivered that spring, and the empty crate sat in the backyard. The garbagemen ignored it, so I asked my mother if the girls could have it for a fort. Of course, every day the boys would take it over by force, and every day Nancy or I would march home to complain, and Mother would come out and tell the boys that the prized crate was ours.
The movie theater. The pool. And the war. That was Iwakuni.
Or it was Iwakuni inside the air station gates. Outside was Japan, a Japan almost untouched by Western culture. The roads were usually dirt with benjo ditches running along the side and separating rice paddies or other fields from the road. The Japanese had an efficient, if fragrant, way of dealing with human waste. Receptacles in the houses emptied into open wide ditches along the road. Every road. Periodically, a man with a wooden bucket would walk beside the benjo ditches and scoop out the floating waste, which he then put in his wagon—which we called a honey wagon—and carried it to a version of a compost heap to later be used as fertilizer. As hard as it is to believe, it wasn’t difficult at all to get accustomed to the unrelenting odor. On our second and third trips to Japan, we arrived, took a deep breath, and said, “Ah! The smell of home.”
Directly behind our house was a stone seawall that formed the border of the base and the retaining wall for a river that ran to the inland sea. From my brother’s windows or from the