Aloha, Baby-Sitters! Read online

  “Uh, excuse me?”

  “That means toys and games,” Jenny explained. “I saw it on TV. This fairy goes into an empty room and waves her wand and makes toys appear. At the lowest possible price.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  We shoved off in the direction of the park.

  The day had really heated up. I was sweating by the time we arrived. The sprinkler was going full force, and kids were crowded underneath. (Boy, was I tempted to join them.)

  As Jenny scampered into the spray, tiara and all, I wheeled Andrea to a shady bench. I sat near a woman who was reading a paperback novel.

  I played with Andrea for awhile, keeping an eye on Jenny. An ice cream truck pulled up to a nearby corner and played a tinkly, music-box-type tune. I stood Andrea on my lap and made her dance to the beat. She thought that was hilarious.

  “Mallory, come here!” Jenny shouted.

  She was playing in the sandbox now. Her wet body was coated with sand. I picked up Andrea and walked over to Jenny.

  “I want a Fudgsicle!” she demanded.

  “Well, I have apple-cinnamon mini rice cakes,” I said.

  “Yuck! I hate those! Those are poison! Buy me a Fudgsicle. I’ll wash my hands.”

  “Jennifer, your mom told me you weren’t to have any sweets —”

  “I DON’T WANT SWEETS! I WANT ICE CREAM!”

  I had a few dollars in my pocket. Enough for an ice cream for both of us. But I held firm.

  “Sorry, Jennifer.”

  “YOU’RE NOT MY MOMMY! MOMMY WOULD LET ME! YOU’RE STUPID AND I HATE YOU!” Jenny picked up a fistful of sand. Before she could throw it, I turned my back. Sand rained around me, but none of it landed on Andrea.

  I was furious. I marched back to the bench and sat down.

  Jenny stood up and began kicking sand all over the place. (Fortunately, no kids were near her.) She threw her magic wand across the playground. Her features scrunched up. She burst into tears.

  Tinkle-de-tinkle-de-tinkle-de-tinkle went the bells of the ice cream truck.

  I wanted to throw a rock at it.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!” A shriek ripped out of Jenny’s mouth. She threw herself onto the sand, kicking her feet and flailing her arms.

  A mom passed by, holding a toddler. She cast a startled look toward Jenny, then saw me and walked on. Another mom gave me a tiny smile. I didn’t know if she was being sympathetic or polite or just glad her kids weren’t such monsters.

  The woman beside me set down her book and stared at Jenny. I felt mortified. I imagined the whole park was staring at us. Plus the ice-cream man. Plus the people who lived across the street.

  But I was not going to let that bother me. Jenny was in no danger. She was putting no other kids in danger. I was determined to leave her there. She had to learn.

  “She seems to be in great pain,” said the woman with the book.

  I turned toward her. She was looking at me very sternly.

  “Well, I know,” I replied. “But her mom said —”

  “I’m sure her mom doesn’t mean for her child to be neglected, dear.”

  Neglected? How could she say that? What did she know about dealing with spoiled brats?

  “Thanks,” I said politely.

  I did not budge an inch. I continued playing with Andrea.

  “YOOUUU’RE STUUUUPIIIID!” Jenny shrieked.

  The woman slapped her book shut and stood up. Shaking her head and muttering to herself, she began to walk away.

  I tried not to look at her, but I couldn’t help it. She had stopped, and she was glaring at me.

  Well, not at me, exactly.

  She was reading the print on my shirt. The Baby-sitters Club’s name and number.

  Ugh.

  That came out sounding so dull.

  But I couldn’t help it. I was still kind of in shock. I didn’t dare write about how I was really feeling.

  The day started out fine. It was clear and gorgeous (again). We all woke up early (again) and had a fantastic, delicious breakfast in the hotel (again).

  Well, most of it was fantastic and delicious.

  I would not, however, touch the Samoan Baked Breadfruit with pe‘e pe‘e.

  “Claudia, it’s wonderful,” Dawn insisted as we passed down the line.

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “It sounds disgusting! The breadfruit’s bad enough. How do you know what’s in it?”

  Dawn laughed. “The word has apostrophes! It’s pronounced peh-eh peh-eh. It’s made with coconut cream.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I didn’t listen to Dawn’s answer. It’s a free country, and I stuck with the simpler stuff.

  After breakfast, we split into groups again. As usual, most kids wanted to go to the beach. I was leaning in that direction, too. But Ms. Bernhardt, my social studies teacher, offered to take a group to Pearl City to visit Pearl Harbor.

  I signed up right away.

  Once, when I was a little girl, I was on vacation with my family when an awful man started arguing with my dad. I don’t recall what they were fighting about, but I do remember the man saying something like, “You got us at Pearl Harbor. What more do you want?”

  And I’ll never forget my dad’s reaction. His face went cold. He turned and walked away without saying another word, signaling for us to follow.

  I realized that the man had said something bigoted to Dad, but I couldn’t figure out what.

  I asked Janine soon afterward, and she told me.

  You see, many years ago, Japanese warplanes sneak-attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. They destroyed huge ships and killed thousands of sailors. That was what finally drove the United States to enter World War Two. After the attack, anti-Japanese prejudice was tremendous in the U.S. Thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens were sent away to isolated, prison-like places called internment camps, for no other reason than their ethnicity. (I read about all this in a book called A Fence Away from Freedom by Ellen Levine, which has interviews with people who were sent to the camps as kids.)

  It was hard to imagine something as awful as the bombing in a place like Hawaii. I was curious to see Pearl Harbor firsthand.

  We took the public bus. I sat with Mary Anne, who was the only other BSC member to sign up (four boys did, too).

  When we arrived, Ms. Bernhardt led us through an entrance gate, where the guard gave her a number.

  “Listen up,” Ms. Bernhardt announced. “We are going to see the remains of the battleship USS Arizona, but we have to take a shuttle boat to reach it. We’re in the next group, so let’s hit the museum in the meantime.”

  I didn’t see any bomb craters. I saw plenty of sailors walking around. Everything looked in good shape. I was glad Pearl Harbor had recovered.

  In the museum we saw exhibits about the Japanese-American soldiers who had fought for the U.S. in World War Two. That was cool.

  Then our number was called, and we were ushered into a movie theater. “I didn’t know we were going to see a movie,” Mary Anne whispered.

  “Did you spot a popcorn stand?” I asked.

  “No.”

  We both giggled as the lights went down.

  I did not giggle after that. I couldn’t. The movie was sickening. Someone had actually filmed the destruction of Pearl Harbor. You could hear the bombers buzzing overhead and see the ships exploding into bits, sending huge chunks of metal into the air.

  Over two thousand American servicemen died in the attack. Six battleships were sunk in the harbor. Three hundred warplanes were destroyed.

  By Japan.

  Hearing about it had been bad enough. Seeing it made me sick to my stomach.

  My parents hadn’t been born then. But my grandparents were living in Japan. I remember my grandmother telling me that everyone in Japan used to revere the emperor. But the emperor had ordered the attack. So did that mean my grandparents were in favor of it? How had they reacted to the news? With happiness? Triumph?
/>   The thought was horrifying. My grandmother? Sweet, kind Mimi?

  Why? Why did the emperor do it? The film didn’t really explain.

  When the lights went up, I was shaking.

  As we walked out, a guide led us toward the shuttle boat. We piled aboard, with a few dozen other tourists.

  Floating in the bay in front of us was a huge, rectangular concrete building that sagged in the middle. It looked like a bar of cream cheese that someone had tried to squash.

  It did not, however, look like the remains of a ship.

  Then, as we drew closer, I could see twisted, rusty black pieces of metal jutting out of the water.

  “That’s what is left of the Arizona,” Ms. Bernhardt said. “One of the strongest ships ever built.”

  “Cool,” said Pete Black, who was in our group.

  I didn’t think it was cool at all. I thought of all the sailors who had been inside, not knowing what was in store for them, hearing a strange buzzing noise that grew louder and louder …

  Cool? Horrible was more like it. Outrageous. Unthinkable.

  Our boat docked alongside the memorial, and we stepped aboard. Our guide was an elderly man named Mr. Blanchard, who was wearing a U.S. Navy hat. He led us through the museum inside, which contained a small chapel. On the wall of the chapel was a marble tablet carved with the names of the servicemen who died on that long-ago day in Pearl Harbor.

  Mr. Blanchard paused by a big window. Outside it, a piece of the Arizona stuck up from the water like a burned, bony hand.

  “I am a Pearl Harbor survivor,” Mr. Blanchard announced. “I was stationed here in nineteen forty-one when the attack occurred.”

  Our entire group, SMS kids and tourists, fell silent. Mr. Blanchard looked out the window and said softly, “I was one of the lucky ones. It was a Sunday, and I was on leave. But I lost some of my best buddies right here. The Arizona, as you can see, is still underneath us. And so are they.”

  My heart did a flip-flop.

  Oh my lord. Underneath us? The idea was so morbid I started feeling dizzy. How did Mr. Blanchard ever get over the horror? And what about the sailors’ families?

  The poor guys never had a chance. They were ambushed.

  And everyone in that group knew who’d done the ambushing.

  I stared straight ahead. I knew I wasn’t the only Asian there that day. But were any of the others Japanese-American? Would people know that I was? Or would they take me for Hawaiian, or Korean, or Chinese?

  Mimi once told me about a friend of hers, a little girl who’d immigrated to America around the same time she did. The girl wanted so badly to look like a Caucasian, she walked around everywhere with her eyes wide open, thinking she’d fool people.

  Janine and I used to roll on the floor with laughter whenever we heard that story. Our parents raised us to be proud of our heritage. And I always have been.

  Until that day.

  I could not stop thinking of that little girl. For the first time in my life, I wished I had blond hair and round blue eyes. I felt the eyes of the people in our group burning into the back of my head.

  “Claudia?” Mary Anne asked. “Are you okay?”

  For a moment — just a moment — I thought I’d tell Mary Anne what I was thinking. But I couldn’t. This was something I had to keep inside me.

  “Fine!” I replied. “Just a little … seasick, that’s all.”

  As we walked on, following Mr. Blanchard and Ms. Bernhardt, I thought of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About the atomic bombs that flattened those entire cities. The bombs were dropped by the U.S. That was much worse than this.

  But thinking about that didn’t make me feel better at all. In fact, it made me feel worse.

  The whole war, when you thought about it, was a terrible, bloody mess. It should never have been started in the first place.

  I could not wait to get far, far away from Pearl Harbor.

  “Have you seen a record store?” Stacey asked.

  I riffled through my Hawaiian phrase book. “Ewa.”

  “Ay vah?” Stacey asked.

  “Ewa. That means ‘away from Diamond Head.’ That’s how you give directions here. Ewa and Diamond Head.”

  Diamond Head, by the way, is an extinct volcano. It’s just past Waikiki.

  Which is where Stacey and I were on Wednesday morning (Waikiki, not the volcano), along with Mrs. Gonzalez and eight other SMS kids.

  Yes, Waikiki has a beach, and no, we were not on it. Did you think this trip was pure laziness and fun? Guess again. We were examining the local customs and native habitats.

  Well, sort of. We were shopping on Waikiki’s main drag, Kalakaua Avenue.

  To tell you the truth, just about all of Waikiki is a shopping district. Except for the beach.

  The beach is another story. I’d spent part of Tuesday there, so I knew it well.

  Look to your right and you see sand, sand, sand. In front of you are hundreds of swimmers, surfers, and windsurfers. Diamond Head is to your left, like a distant crouching monster.

  Behind you are the high-rise hotels (speaking of monsters). They’re like a bunch of ugly giant androids, elbowing each other for the best view of the ocean.

  Or I should say, best view of the moana, in the Hawaiian tongue.

  “Abby, will you take your head out of that book?” Stacey said. “We don’t have —”

  “Also, you don’t say north or south,” I told her. “You say mauka when you mean toward the mountains, and makai when you mean toward the ocean.”

  “Abbyyy —”

  “‘Pidgin English is another dialect spoken by the locals,’” I read. “‘It has a rich vocabulary all its own.’”

  “I’m leaving,” Stacey said.

  I closed the book. “Sorry. Shall we look at some hideous Hawaiian shirts?”

  Stacey gave me stinkeye (loosely translated: a Look, in pidgin English). She did not seem terribly interested in the goods at the Hula Souvenir Shoppe. Mrs. Gonzalez had allowed us half an hour to browse on our own before we met up again, and I think Stacey had grander things in mind.

  Stacey was WOR (WithOut Robert) this morning, because he hates shopping. So I think she felt pressure to do a whole week’s worth right then.

  As for me? Well, I have to confess a deep, dark secret. I loooove tacky, touristy shops. I don’t know why. My mom calls me a tsotchke maven (loosely translated from the Yiddish: someone who loves weird and cheap trinkets).

  Before Stacey could say a word, I picked up a small, windup hula dancer. I turned its key, and it started singing “Aloha ‘Oe.”

  “I absolutely have to buy this!” I exclaimed.

  Stacey was history. Off on a quest for Ralph Lauren.

  I ended up with a tin pineapple pencil sharpener, a glow-in-the-dark Waikiki plastic tumbler, and a poster of a grumpy-looking bulldog that said I’D RATHER BE WIND-SURFING.

  Afterward our group headed east — er, Diamond Head — toward peaceful Kapiolani Park. There we heard a guy playing a guitar, which makes funny, swooping sounds (if you’ve ever heard “Aloha ‘Oe,” you know what I mean). Next stop was the Waikiki Aquarium, where we saw coral that looked like tentacled extra-terrestrial beasts. (Did you know that coral is a living thing? I didn’t.) I also enjoyed watching these cute Hawaiian monk seals, until a guard told us they were on the brink of extinction. (I’m glad Dawn wasn’t there. She’d have organized a protest on the spot.)

  The moment we left the building, Stacey cried out, “Tanning time!”

  “You’ve all had enough of this strenuous trip?” Mrs. Gonzalez asked.

  “Yeeaaahh!”

  It was unanimous. We marched makai. Mrs. Gonzalez rented an umbrella and we hit the beach.

  Well, “hit” isn’t exactly the right word. “Stepped gingerly between towels” was more like it. Finding a spot for ten kids and a grown-up on Waikiki Beach is a little like finding a seat on the New York City subway at rush hour.

  “Follow me.” I led everybody to
ward the edge of the beach, farthest from the hotels. It was definitely a better choice: more room, less noise, and lots of hunky surfers running around.

  I spread out my towel surfer (in the direction of the surfers). Stacey put hers to my right.

  I slathered myself with the highest-possible-power sunscreen. I breathed in the warm, salty air and smiled.

  “No allergies?” Stacey asked.

  “Nope,” I replied as I lay down.

  I was in total heaven.

  I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, Stacey was gone.

  I stood up. Mrs. Gonzalez was under the umbrella with her nose in a magazine. Some of the other kids were throwing a Frisbee around. I spotted Stacey in the water.

  I was about to join her when a volleyball landed at my feet.

  “Sorry!” a voice called out.

  I picked up the ball, threw it upward, and punched it. It sailed into the arms of a blond, dimply guy with muscular pecs. “Good shot,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  But I was looking over his shoulder. At a TV camera crew, setting up by a volleyball net.

  A dark-haired woman wearing a backward-turned baseball cap was pacing around, shouting into a mobile phone. Two volleyball teams faced off across the net. When Mr. Dimples returned, they started playing.

  I don’t know about you, but I absolutely adore volleyball.

  I especially adore it when TV cameras are nearby.

  Did I ever tell you I was on TV once? Yup. I was in fifth grade, and a local news team came to cover a hurricane that blew a tree into our school. I was the girl crossing her eyes behind the newscaster, just to the left. (I saved the tape. I play it, oh, twice a month. I think it shows real talent.)

  Anyway, as I moseyed over to the volleyball net, I could hear what the woman was saying into the phone: “She should have told us she was union. What am I going to do now?”

  I watched the teams volley for awhile. When the ball bounced into the sidelines, I bumped it back in.