Backwards We Spell Japan

Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters of our names spell JAPAN. We always knew that. We children always knew that our father is Dutch and that he is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. It was during World War II. He was born on the island of Java. Before it was called Indonesia. Before, when it was a Dutch colony run by the Dutch East India Company. One captain Straub was our seafaring ancestor who married a princess from the island of Madura.
The Dutch traded coffee and sugar, quinine and indigo to bring back to the motherland, and tea that grew on plantations cleared from the jungle. My father lived on tea and sugar plantations, with my Oma, his two sisters, and my grandfather Straub, a mechanical engineer who kept the plantation machinery going. He starved to death in a POW camp outside of Tokyo. I know him only as a charcoal drawing on white paper hanging above my father’s bed.
“Those dirty Japs,” Mom always says. “Thank God for the atomic bomb.”
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp because Mom tells everybody. The people with blank faces at St. Ambrose Church that mom forces me to attend, to my neighbor Leslie’s mother, to Lou the skinny milkman who nods and nods and nods.
“They don’t know about the dirty Japs, Patti,” she says to me. I tell Mom about the Holocaust we are studying in school. Gritty black-and-white films of shriveled corpses bulldozed into pits, Jews’ hair made into rugs, their skin into soap. “Tell your teacher your father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says. I do. My teacher stares at me bewildered.
“Is your father Japanese?” No, no. I shake my head. “Is he Jewish?” No, no. I can’t speak. I feel it stuck in my throat. My family is in the wrong concentration camp.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We go to the K-Mart, Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. With Mom, who chases down blue-light specials for cheap blue-and-red plaid shirts.
“Come on, kids, hurry!” she says running.
It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. August 6, 1976 in Boulder, Colorado. We stop at the snack stand for white hoagie sandwiches with ham and lettuce and mayonnaise. Mom orders water, but Nancy pleads for Icees, and Mom thinks, and then says OK. We hold the waxy Icee drink cups with polar bear triangles on the side that Albert cuts out and mails in for free cheapo gifts. The Icee cups full of red slush that make it easy for Nancy and me to shoplift red fingernail polish in.
“$4.95,” the girl behind the counter says. She is bored, with blond-feathered hair. She glosses her lips with a sour grape Bonnie Bell lip smacker. She stares at Mom’s nose, broken in 1943 when she was kicked by a horse. Plastic surgery wasn’t too good back then and now her nose looks like someone mashed a wad of silly putty on the tip.
“Do you know what today is?” Mom asks. The girl shrugs. “It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. When we bombed the Japs.” I press my face to the glass, watch my nose leave a crescent of steam.
You know, my husband is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says, fishing through her big, black secondhand handbag. “If we didn’t drop the bomb, none of these children would be standing in front of you.” We suck our Icees, bite the straws, shoulders hunched, backs turned. We disappear into our own fantasy. We are not here with Mom. Not with this moment.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says. Mom can’t find the money. She can find the car keys at the bottom of the bag, along with the broken lipstick containers, cracker crumbs and dried lemon slices swiped from restaurants. She can find the coupons, the dry felt-tip pens, the spare Kotex that will catch her diarrhea that suddenly comes on out of nowhere, because she ate too many tomatoes or drank too much black coffee. The diarrhea that drops in small brown bloodstains behind her after she quickly pays the girl, then shuffles to the bathroom at the back of the store.
Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. We wolf down our hoagies sitting in the yellow and orange snack booths waiting for Mom. Nancy is the oldest, older than me by six years. Then came Albert, ten months later. Irish twins, my father says. Then came me, born late, the day after Christmas, 1966. And then Jeanie, two Februarys later. Mom says we were accidents. Four 10-pound accidents. She could have found somebody rich, married Liberace, or Onassis, or somebody else, she says. But she asked our father to marry her, and she got us.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We are packed in our house together, like the thousands packed into the concentration camp, in the monastery at Ambarawa 7 where Dad lived for three years as a little boy. We are packed into house that has no dining room and no family room. Jeanie and Albert are together in one bedroom, Nancy and me in another. Then Mom and Dad in the big bedroom. But Mom is everywhere. She is in the oversized painting of fishing boats washed on the shore, mysteriously without fishermen, hanging crooked in the living room. She is the collection of pen-and-ink caricature drawings on the wall, her oversized head looking like a young Johnny Cash with long hair, her hand posed with a writing quill. She is the innumerable scattering of out-of-date books, astronomy, chemistry, world encyclopedias and communist China film strips grabbed from the free box at the Boulder Valley School’s discard sale. She is the neighbor’s trashcans that she digs through, searching, pulling, hauling things back to the house, old wood, broken mirrors, or locks with no keys. She is the popcorn-yellow paint in the kitchen laced heavy with gray cobwebs and pork sausage grease splatters, the pork sausage grease saved in a coffee cup that smells up the kitchen, smells up the house, fouls my heart. She is the cut up clothing laying all over the floor, on every floor, in every corner, heaped like refugee rag dolls, along with the piles of records, ripped up hand bags, old cans of blue paint. The blue paint she painted the outside of the house without finishing the job, the blue paint that streaks the back of the bathroom door, that is all over the porcelain toilets, all over the scuff marks on the tips of her shoes.
We know our father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp.
“Scrape your plate,” Mom always says. “I should put you in a concentration camp and let you starve.” That’s what Mom says at the dinner table while we stare at the trash piled high on the fake wood table -- the elastic cut off from Dad and Albert’s old underwear, the coupons glued together with spilled milk and mold, the thimbles, newspaper clippings, nuts and bolts, the unwashed dishes, dirty knick knacks from garage sales, the dusty plastic flowers falling out of a dented aluminum tea kettle.
We eat Mom’s cooking, eat chipped beef that was boiled in a plastic bag, or chew green peppers stuffed with white rice off of chipped plates and drink from faded, plastic glasses that once had pink and green beach scenes on them. Mom found them last week at a garage sale for a quarter.
We hold Mom’s cooking in our mouths, peppers stuffed with rice with no flavor. We wipe our faces with paper towels when she’s not looking and unload the mouthfuls in them. We slink under the table. We try to escape. I pick through the broken cookies at the bottom of the wooden cookie jar, brushing off the tiny bugs and old crumbs clinging to them.
We know our father was a child survivor of a concentration camp. How he starved. A 10-year old boy, taken from his mother and sisters and put in a camp for old men and adolescent boys. The Jongenscamp. Surviving on clothing starch, snails, grass or scraping the ultra-thin layer inside a banana peel, or filling his belly up with the compressed straw that was for the guards’ pigs, or drinking from toilets in the dark of the night, or crouching by the bamboo fence and waiting for something to eat, for something to crawl under the fence and into the camp – anything -- rats or snakes that he grabbed by the tail and whipped to break their backs and eat them raw.
“Look at this!” Mom cries. “Look at this last drop of milk you have wasted! Sit back down here and drink it. People are starving to death!” Her mouth is a rectangular slot of false teeth lined with shiny wire, clenched, carving lines deep as dry old cheese into the corners of her mouth. All I see are her waxy pink-gummed false teeth that slide out of her mouth and sit in a glass of water that is never changed. The glass of water on top of the rusting medicine cabinet in the bathroom that Mom, using her zigzag scissors, pasted over with sticky contact paper of sailing ships. I see the false teeth, yellow hunks of food stuck between the teeth, floating and trying to escape. They sit in front of the mirror dimmed by years of white toothpaste splatter where I stare at myself brushing my teeth with my blue gun toothbrush. I am thin, thin, skeleton thin, knobby elbows, tall for my age. My Dutch white face, heart-shaped with wide Czech cheeks and a pointy chinned, is shocked by my dark brown hair that I hate, stick straight like Dad’s. With my green-brown eyes I stare. I don’t think. I don’t feel.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. I see Dad sitting on the rattan couch that was once new from American Furniture warehouse, now covered with layers of unsewn, unmatched tattered fabric that was on sale at So-Fro Fabrics for 35 cents a yard.
Dad sits alone on the couch listening to Madame Butterfly. The part where she finds out that Pinkerton has a new wife. A cone of sandalwood incense burns He has taken pills for his migraine headaches. The headaches he gets every day to some degree. Sometimes bad. In the middle of the night, waking up sweating. From remembering something. Or thinking of it. He takes codeine, amatriptaline, bottlesfuls. Their yellow-brown plastic containers sit next to his bed on the bed stand next to the picture of Jesus that glows in the dark. The empty containers fall, roll under the bed. Some tall and thin, other fat and big. With long pills, yellow pills, round white pills. When the headaches are really bad he goes to the hospital and they stick a needle full of Demerol in his neck and he sleeps for days.
Tonight the headache is bad. Dad took many pills. He is slow. I walk up behind him and without a word gently place my hands on his head. I ask God why. Why? Why do people suffer? Why did my father have to go through hell as a child? Why did he survive?
My hands run like seeping water through his hair, gray, greasy, limp. My hands pull his hair, just like the nurse he had in Java. She knew just where to twist and pull a section of hair to make a headache go away. I pull his hair. Pull out the tigers and snakes roaming the jungles of Indonesia, when it was the Dutch East Indies. Pull out the pain, pull out the war, pull out the headache that will leave Dad in bed with a wet washcloth over his eyes. Unable to move, drenched in tears and sweat, unable to hear in the darkness of his room or go to work at his job as a mechanical engineer beneath fluorescent lights in a yellow brick building in Boulder.
My fingers push on his muscles, the bulging tight muscles in his neck that connect to his head, that surge into his eyes, forcing them closed, unable to watch Star Trek or Buck Rogers or the Project Blue Book episodes that we have seen so many times we know the dialogue by heart.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says, searching for something, alone in the kitchen as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them. “Rocco moco poco pup. Shit, dog house.” My hands pull Dad’s hair harder.
“Shake your hands,” Dad says in his thick Dutch accent. “Shake the pain out of your hands. Get rid of it.”
I shake and I shake.
“Cat, rat, trap, dog dump,” Mom says as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them.
At midnight, Dad vomits in the bathroom. Vomits in the toilet that is always clogged with Mom’s diarrhea that is caused by her weak bowels. Because the doctors cut her fistula when she delivered Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie, all 10-pound children.
“They ripped my guts up,” Mom tells the woman at the K-Mart check out counter. “Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters spell Japan.