The Yokota Officers Club Read online

  “A BITTERSWEET AND OFTEN FUNNY NOVEL

  about being different; about secrets; and about what happens when the luster fades. Sarah Bird is a wonderful writer.”

  —LEE SMITH

  “Like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible … The Yokota Officers Club succeeds on several levels. Bird’s characters are each fully formed, she renders the setting with lively detail, and there is a quippy, character-informing wit that informs the entire tale and gives it soul.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “Bird’s writing brings life to every person and place in this novel.… Laughter comes often and is uncontrolled. The compulsion to read segments out loud (even if no one is listening) is overwhelming.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Bird’s wonderful new novel explores the testosterone jungle of the military family from a fresh, funny, female point of view. Codes are cracked, secrets revealed, hearts broken and mended and broken again. The result is an extraordinary book full of laughter, tears, and an unforgettable cast of characters.”

  —MARK CHILDRESS

  “[A] funny, gritty, poignant novel … Like a magician revealing layer upon layer in a complicated trick, Bird constructs a military family’s story that continues to astonish and impress to the end.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  “A melding of exuberant wit and deep compassion … The miracle of The Yokota Officers Club is that it defies the laws of its own gravity. How can a story about dispossession and unspeakable loss, about fading national glory and family heartbreak, be so consistently—and authentically—hilarious?”

  —STEPHEN HARRIGAN

  “Both funny and heartbreaking, this is a gripping novel of family secrets.”

  —Booklist (Editor’s Choice)

  “STUNNING … THOROUGHLY ENGROSSING …

  It is a tale of family alliances and rebellions that sidesteps cliché and embraces bittersweet reality.”

  —Texas Monthly

  “Breathtaking … Bird has pulled off what only the best novelists do: She has imbedded a family tragedy in a much larger one, encompassing the victor and the vanquished. At the same time, her story illustrates the power of one person’s sins to infect the lives of innocents.… She lets the children be the source of insight into adult secrets and subtleties, and by book’s end those secrets pack a huge emotional wallop.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Who else can write about dancing, music, JP-4 fuel, the military, and strawberries, make it funny, and also make it about matters of the heart? Only Sarah Bird. This is her best book yet, a big book that you’ll want to read again as soon as you finish it the first time.”

  —CLYDE EDGERTON

  “Sarah Bird has written a remarkable book that captures the upheaval of the 1960s while delving into mechanics of family relationships, all in an unfamiliar but interesting setting. Although Bernie is wise, funny, and refreshingly plucky, my favorite character is Moe, Bernie’s mother, a misunderstood woman, eminently real and ultimately redeemable. The Yokota Officers Club [is] a powerful novel that will inspire both laughter and tears.”

  —Chattanooga Times/Free Press

  “In her colorful and affecting new novel, Sarah Bird brings to life an American subculture.… Bird’s sure hand at characterization is evident not only in the creation of Bernie and Fumiko, but also in Bernie’s ragtag, resourceful siblings and their painfully disillusioned parents. But this is a very funny book, too—sometimes savagely so.… It is, in short, a treat.

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “[A] large, lush novel, comic but infused with pain … Bird probes her past as a military brat and creates a complex work that goes beyond her earlier comic achievements. With The Yokota Officers Club, Bird has made an unprecedented emotional investment and earned the accolade ‘great writer.’ … American literature is richer for it.”

  —The Austin American-Statesman

  “FUNNY, WRENCHING, SINGULARLY MOVING …

  Sarah Bird’s world, viewed through the eyes and memories of a sassy Air Force brat, is our world: tender, hurtful, complex, unexplained.”

  — SHELBY HEARON

  “Stories nestle inside stories … in Bird’s wonderful fifth novel.… Bernie—sharp and snarky, yet severely introverted—is a delightful heroine, and the large cast that swirls around her is equally endearing. Particularly fine are the wisecracking yet nurturing Moe and the oddly touching Bobby Moses.… The dialogue is first-rate, and all the ’60s brand-name dropping is amusing; the decade becomes fresh again when seen from the unusual perspective of a military family (especially this one) removed from mainland society.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Highly recommended … Exquisitely rendered … [Bird] nails the voice of Bernie in a delicate balance of confused, shy child vs. the bright emerging woman she has become. Bird’s masterly use of the tricky technique of children revealing adult subtleties is breathtaking.”

  —Library Journal

  “A powerful piece of work … It renders beautifully the sense of impermanence that hovers over [Bernie] and her siblings, the intrigues among her father’s squadron’s wives, and the genuine heroism of its fliers. And the passages concerned with the life of Fumiko, the family’s Japanese maid and the narrator’s closest friend, are as moving as anything I’ve read in recent years.”

  —JOHN GRAVES

  “The first half of this book will make you scream with laughter. The second half will tear your heart out. Very few novelists have gotten the military-brat story right. Believe me, Sarah Bird gets it right. For the first time we have a writer as dead-on as Pat Conroy, but giving the daughter’s point of view. We are so very lucky that Sarah Bird has brought her immense talents to the telling of our story.”

  —MARY EDWARDS WERTSCH

  Author of Military Brats

  “A book of incisive wit and poignancy that uses an astonishing clarity of detail in painting its picture of military family life.… Bird excels at injecting not just the visual details, but also the smells and sounds of post-war Japan. Through odors that serve as the title of each succeeding chapter, and through Bernie’s incredibly truthful and true-to-life voice, the novel finds its emotional center.… It should be on every reader’s list of must-haves.”

  —Book Page

  ALSO BY SARAH BIRD

  Alamo House

  The Boyfriend School

  The Mommy Club

  Virgin of the Rodeo

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by Sarah Bird

  Reading group guide copyright © 2002 by Sarah Bird and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002092460

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77575-7

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  For my father, John Aaron Bird, Lt. Col. USAF, DFC

  My mother, Colista Marie McCabe Bird, R.N., Lt. US Army

  My brothers, John Aaron, Thomas Cameron, and Steven Michael

  My sisters, Martha Lynn and Mary Katherine

  Warriors all.

&
nbsp; I imagined that all of us could meet on some impeccably manicured field, all the military brats, in a gathering so vast that it would be like the assembling of some vivid and undauntable army. We could come together on this parade ground at dusk, million voiced and articulating our secret anthems of hurt and joy. We could praise each other in voices that understand both the magnificence and pain of our transient lives.…

  In this parade … our fathers would stand at rigid attention. Then they would begin to salute us, one by one, and in that salute, that one sign of recognition, of acknowledgment, they would thank us for the first time. They would be thanking their own children for … enduring a military childhood.

  —Pat Conroy, from the introduction to Military Brats:

  Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress

  by Mary Edwards Wertsch

  He stretched his arms towards his child, but the boy cried and nestled in his nurse’s bosom, scared at the sight of his father’s armor, and at the horse-hair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet. His father and mother laughed to see him, but Hektor took the helmet from his head and laid it all gleaming upon the ground. Then he took his darling child.

  —Homer, Illiad (trans. Samuel Butler)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Brasso

  Diesel

  Grass

  Herbal Essence

  Jungle Gardenia

  Tabu

  Young Pinkoo

  Fries

  Weed

  Right Guard

  Popcorn

  Tide

  Wild Root Creme Oil

  Spic ’n’ Span

  Mildew

  Kool

  Benjo

  Oxygen

  Jergens

  Brut

  Joy

  Smoke

  Brylcreem

  Lavender

  October 1956

  Sweat

  Honeysuckle

  Polyvinyl

  Enchiladas

  Night Soil

  Toast

  Vitamins

  Lacquer

  Polish

  Kool

  Onion Rings

  DDT

  Breath

  Marshmallow Creme

  Chlorine

  White Russian

  Candied Tangerine

  Spiced Apple

  Strawberries

  Rain

  Perfume

  Acknowledgments

  A Reader’s Guide

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  Dear Dependents of the United States Air Force:

  Welcome to your new duty assignment, Kadena Air Base, Okinawa.

  Okinawa is the principal island of the 160 islands that make up the Ryukyu archipelago. Only 67 miles long and from 2 to 17 miles wide, Okinawa is often referred to as the “Keystone of the Pacific” because of its strategic Far East location roughly 900 miles from Tokyo, Manila, Seoul, and Hong Kong.

  Originally an independent nation, Okinawa has endured long periods of both Chinese and Japanese domination. After World War II, the island remained under U.S. military control. The United States will continue its custodianship as long as conditions of threat and tension exist in the Far East.

  Bear in mind as you begin your tour that the serviceman’s family is just as much a representative of the United States Government as the serviceman himself.

  Your President and Commander in Chief,

  Lyndon Baines Johnson

  On the map at the back of the pamphlet, Japan resembles a horned caterpillar rearing up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My destination, the Ryukyu Islands, trails behind like a scatter of droppings. We’ve been in the air for seventeen hours. Sheets of rain snake across the plastic pane of the window next to me. A light on the wing blinks red in the night. Lulled by the drone of the jet engines taking me to join my family at Kadena Air Base, I slide back into the anesthetized stupor that travel always induces.

  Phenobarbital, that was my mother, Moe’s, drug of choice for traveling with six children packed into a station wagon when we PCS’d—Permanent Change of Station—six times in eight years. We, her children, took the drug, not Moe. A nurse, she administered the meticulously titrated doses in tiny chips that floated like specks of goldfish food in our cups of apple juice.

  “How else was I supposed to keep you from murdering each other?” Moe had answered when I inquired about the peculiar lassitude that always seemed to overtake us upon departing Maxwell Air Force Base, or Travis, or Harlingen, or Brooks, or Kirtland, or Mountain Home Air Force Base. Especially Mountain Home. All I remember about leaving that base was pulling out of Boise, Idaho, with my breath freezing in the predawn mountain chill and regaining consciousness outside of Tonopah, Nevada, with a bib of drool and my nasal linings dried to corn flakes.

  “You drugged us? Your children? You drugged us?”

  “I thought about running a hose in from the exhaust pipe. That really would have quieted you down.”

  “You drugged us?”

  “Think about it, Bernie. Six kids, two of them in diapers when we transferred out of Japan, crammed into a station wagon with the luggage strapped on top and a maniac behind the wheel who wouldn’t stop unless you put a gun to his head. Me passing around the bologna sandwiches and the potty chair, sprinkling the cars behind us when the potty can got full. And the whole time I’m wrestling with a map the size of the Magna Carta and trying to navigate for a guy used to getting directions off a radar screen who keeps barking at me to do something about my children. No, I didn’t have a lot of patience left to deal with Kit screaming about you ‘breathing’ on her or you screaming about Kit ‘looking’ at you or the twins hammering monkey bumps and noogies and X no-backs into each other and Bosco wailing about whatever hamster or turtle or corn snake she had to leave behind at the last base and Bob reenacting entire episodes of Clutch Cargo and someone, usually you, barfing.”

  “Yeah, but what if you’ve turned us all into junkies?”

  “Well, if I have, all I can say is that I did the best I knew how and you lived to tell the tale. That’s all I can say.”

  It was during an unmedicated moment on the long hot drive to Harlingen, Texas, that we all, all us sibs, realized we hated our ultra-Hibernian Catholic names. No one else at our new schools would be named after saints famous for being enucleated or having their tongues plucked out with pliers. We wanted regular names. So, as Moe passed around the potty seat, we rechristened ourselves with the most normal, most American names we could each think of. The twins, Frances Xavier and Bryan Patrick, chose Buzz and Abner. Joseph Anthony, just three at the time, selected Bob, since it was not only a great name and easy to spell but also his favorite aquatic activity. No one wanted me to change Bernie. Mary Colleen, our youngest sister, declared that henceforth she would be known as Nancy, her book-loving soul released in ecstasy at the thought of sharing Nancy Drew’s name.

  “Nancy?” We’d all hooted in unison. We’d already given her the perfect name, Bosco, when she was two and loved Bosco Chocolate Syrup, and we weren’t swapping it for some girl detective in a roadster.

  “Okay,” Bosco had agreed. “But in my mind I’m still calling myself Nancy, and you can’t stop me.”

  “The name represents the self,” my father said from the driver’s seat, flicking a white Tums out of a foil roll into his mouth. “A rejection of the name represents a rejection of the self. You all hate yourselves.”

  We exchanged fiendish looks and had to agree. “Yeah, we all hate ourselves.”

  “Eileen is the only one showing any sense.”

  But it wasn’t sense my middle sister was showing; it was concentration. She glowed like a full-immersion Baptist bursting to the surface of the tank w
hen she finally revealed, “My new name is Kitty.”

  “Kitty?” Moe echoed.

  “Okay, Kit. Kit Root.”

  As Moe dealt out Sioux Bee honey and peanut butter sandwiches, I glanced at Buzz, Abner, Bob, and Bosco and wondered what we’d unloosed. It was clear that Eileen wasn’t getting the joke. Worse, with her platinum-blond hair and Siamese-cat blue eyes, the name Kit fit her too well.

  At our new schools, we all registered under our real names and only called one another Buzz, Abner, Bob, Bosco, and Bernie at home. But Eileen died that day and never again answered to anything, anywhere, except Kit.

  Maybe it was the phenobarbital; still, even without chemical amendments, moving, the part after the packers left but before I became the new girl, a spot I tended to occupy until the packers came again, was always the coziest time in my life. Just me and the sibs and Moe, sealed up in our mobile incubator hurtling down the highway, stuck to the vinyl seat covers, glued to one another with sweat, everyone oozing together, breathing the breaths a sister or brother had exhaled a hundred miles ago. Just us. No outsiders. Outsiders—which is to say, anyone that Moe had not brought into this world—and my family did not mix. We’d only allowed an outsider into the family once.

  Fumiko. Of course I’m thinking about Fumiko again. The first time I crossed the Pacific I was six years old, twelve years ago, and heading for the horned caterpillar itself, not the droppings. Fumiko became part of our family the day we landed in Japan and was one of us for four years. Bob hadn’t even been born when we PCS’d out of Japan eight years ago, and Bosco was barely two, so they don’t remember Fumiko at all. The twins, who’d hung on to her like orangutan babies for the first three years of their lives, have no memory of her either. Kit probably does, though it’s hard to tell since Kit speaks to me as little as possible and Fumiko’s name was never mentioned again after we left Japan anyway.

  But I know Moe remembers Fumiko, and our father, and me—of course, me. Of course I remember Fumiko.

  The Okinawa-bound plane hits an air pocket and belly-flops a few hundred feet. My seatmate, Tammi, grips my arm, digging her pearlized pink nails into my flesh. Tammi looks only slightly older than my sister Kit, who is seventeen. But Tammi is on her way to Okinawa so that her baby daughter, Brandi, can meet her father for the first time. The cabin lights flicker, and Tammi and I look to the front of the plane to see if the stewardi are freaking in any manifest way.