Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird

Author:Sarah Bird
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780385350129
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-27T07:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-NINE

When we return to the front gate of the golf course, we find a group of a dozen Okinawans waiting. Jake exchanges a few words with them, then holds the gate open for the pilgrims who’d texted to let him know they were waiting to enter. “Go on ahead back to the house and get some sleep,” he tells me. “I’ve got to take them to the shrine, then lock up after they leave. It’ll be a while.”

In the guest room, I clear a bunch of Jake’s little sister’s dolls off the futon. They look like a tribe of Barbies crossed with space aliens fully accessorized with tiny shoes and purses. I lie down, certain that I won’t be able to sleep.

A second later, I’m wandering through a vast open meadow where bison, giraffes, and white cats wearing red capes nibble at the grass. I glance down, and at my feet is the gray-speckled linoleum that covered the floors of one of the three schools I attended when we moved so much during fourth grade. When I look back up, I’m standing in front of the class being introduced as the new girl. An iguana in a tall cage stares at me, one eye goggling forward, the other pivoting around to take in the back view.

Codie appears and begins brushing her hair with a tiny silver fork. With each stroke, her curls and frizz straighten until her hair flows like satin around her head. In the next instant, our grandmother takes the fork and is combing the curls back into Codie’s hair. It is not the grandmother I knew, though. Instead, it’s Grandma Setsuko as she was in my favorite old photo of her. She’d told us that the black-and-white had been taken at an Okinawan club in the late sixties, early seventies, sometime around when she met my grandfather Eugene. Her eyes are thickly lined; her hair is ratted into a bubble that rises behind the shiny band of ribbon holding it back from the pouf of bangs that fall over her broad forehead. She is planted front and center, gazing adoringly up at the group playing onstage. They’re the band from the cover of her favorite album.

Always embarrassed by the gap between her front teeth, my grandmother hides most of her smile with a hand in front of her mouth. Still, the corners of her lips show on either side of her hand. They’re painted with a lipstick so pale they seem white. She could have been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend instead of Eugene Overholt’s. That’s the grandmother I see in my dream, who lifts up a curly, unstraightened section of Codie’s hair, lowers her head into the unruly curls, and kisses my sister’s wavy hair as if each strand were a beautiful flower with a heavenly scent.

“When are you coming back?” I ask my sister, eager to work out the details so that she can return.

Before Codie can answer, brown water splashes against my ankles and the taste of caramelized sugar fills my mouth.

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