The Scent of a Family: The Yokota Officers Club

Once upon a time, a lifetime (and a husband) ago, my sister spent a year as a military wife on an Army base in Germany. She learned a little German (Ich spreche keine Deutsch.), traveled big chunks of Europe in a VW Beetle, met Paul Shaffer, and learned all about the pecking order of military wives. This last is about the only thing she shared with me, perhaps in wonderment over a system in which the rank and privileges of the husband are automatically conferred upon the wife, regardless of her suitability for 'command.' What's worse, there's nothing resembling a merit system.

I may know that stuff second-hand; Sarah Bird knows it intimately from a childhood spent schlepping from base to base as an Air Force brat. She drew heavily upon her experience to set the scene for her novel The Yokota Officers Club, so heavily that almost every review I've seen and all the jacket blurbs blather on about how she "nailed" the experience of the military brat. Well, I suppose she did, but I don't think that's the point. What Bird really did was nail the dysfunctional family -- she just happened to place that family in the setting most familiar to her.


The Roots of it All

Bernadine (Bernie) Root, eldest child of Mace and Moe Root; big sister to Bob, Bosco, Kit, and Buzz and Abner (the twins), has just finished her freshman year at University of New Mexico. Bernie heads out to spend summer, 1968 with her family at her father's duty station on Okinawa. A year's absence from the family has sharpened her eye, enough so that she's immediately aware that something is amiss:

By far the most unconvincing member of this body-snatching troupe is playing my mother. For Moe, they should have gotten Elizabeth Taylor from sometime between Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8. Instead, they've ordered up the bloated, blowsy Liz of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As if Moe has been stealing all her skinny children's food, she is easily forty pounds too heavy. Replacing my mother's sparkle, this glassy-eyed stranger has a stunned and stuporous mien.

Something, Bernie realizes she's known all along, has been going on right under her nose for the past six years. Something that has to do with the family's forgetting Fumiko, the little house in Fussa, and the Yokota Officers Club.


Dance, Sister, Dance

Every member of the Root family has one special talent: father Mace flies, mother Moe sings, and baby sister Bosco has a photographic memory. Sister Kit, well, her talent is that she is instantly the most popular girl in school on her first day. Bernie is exactly the opposite, but she can dance. Boy! can she dance!

When Moe pushes Bernie to enter the base dance contest, she does so reluctantly -- and accepts first prize about as reluctantly. The winner is to go on tour with funny man Bobby Moses (ne' Moishe Rabinowitz) to half a dozen air bases around Tokyo. Probably the only reason Bernie decides to accept is her unspoken desire to see Fumiko again, and Yokota is where she'll have to start looking.


You Can't Go Home Again

Life as an entertainer is a blur for Bernie, dancing as "Zelda" to her least favorite song (I Dig Rock-and-Roll Music), wee-hours-of-the-morning meals with Bobby, forcing numb size-ten feet into size six white go-go boots. But when they drive through the gates of Yokota Air Force Base, it's as though she had never left:

We enter Yokota at Gate Three. The guard waves the motor-pool car on, and just that easily, I am back in my childhood. All the bases I've ever lived on blur into this one, the prototype. Driving down Yokota's wide avenues plied by Chevys, Fords, Dodges, I remember seeing the base that first time when we were in Major Wingo's big overheated Pontiac. My heart leaps as we pass the base chapel, as plain and nondenominational as a Quaker meetinghouse, where I had my first communion, where the bishop of Tokyo patted my cheek to confirm me. The smell of gas fumes as we pass the base service station reminds me of how my father would always tell the Japanese attendant, "Fill it up with ethyl." The sight of the base library, a long prefabricated metal building, fills my head with the sound of rain beating on the tin roof and the oily smell of the kerosene heater.

And yet she had left, and nothing is really the same -- familiar faces turn strangers at close inspection, familiar buildings have become shabbier. Yet one thing is still the same... Fumiko.

After all the years, it is Fumiko who can explain why Moe no longer sings and Mace no longer flies; and why Bernie needs her family more than she had ever known.


A Dynamic Family

Bird makes it clear that military families lead a far different life from civilians, especially the rigid social order that derives from rank. Another important factor is the responsibility of the children and the wives to toe the line, for the screwups of the family can also effect careers. At the same time, Bird's tale could be the tale of any family: a controlling father, a beaten-down mother, and all the while the kids are only unconsciously aware that something is dreadfully wrong.

What Bird has done is to take the quintessential dysfunctional family and place it in the setting of a military life. It's telling that mother Moe comes to life only when her husband is gone; that father and mother have stopped talking to one another and now communicate only through their children ("Kit, tell your father..."). As much as any slightly bent family from the pen of John Irving, as much as any damaged dynamic from the keyboard of Pat Conroy, the Root family has a sickness at its very core. It's a sickness that the three daughters all sense (a little female chauvinism, Sarah?) while the three boys are oblivious. Something is dreadfully broken, and at long last Bernie has learned the key. She just doesn't know what lock it fits, and probably never will.


Overall

Sarah Bird demonstrates a marvelous eye for detail in The Yokota Officers Club, not only the internal workings of a complex family but also the setting itself. She can paint a telling scene, to be sure, but more than any author I've read in a long time, Bird builds a setting through smell. Psychologists tell us that the most direct route to our memories runs through the olfactory nerve, and Bird seems to have taken this to heart.

Before I reach the high fence surrounding the pool, the morning breeze brings the scent of chlorine, Coppertone, rubber swim caps, and warm wet cement and I am swamped by nostalgia.

Her final chapter likewise contains a litany of the scents of Bernie's childhood:

I inhale the [straw]berries' fragrance and realize that what I was bottling all those years ago was memory. That honeysuckle was just one link in an endless limbic chain that contains the smells of my family and our lives together: Baby Magic, support hose, Kool menthol cigarettes, sweat and Chanel No. 5, soggy diapers, talcum powder, Young Pinkoo lipstick, rice crackers, green tea, benjo ditches, tangerines and caramelized sugar, Brasso, Kiwi shoe wax, Right Guard, vodka...

Bird also shows a keen eye for the absurd combined with a wicked sense of humor:

For a second, she stops dead, bobbing her head as she tries to find the rhythm, then holds her nose and shimmies down, pretending to blow bubbles as she descends.

"The Swim!" she announces, pleased with herself.

"So it is," I answer, amazed that with all her frenetic motion, she never manages to hit the beat even once, even accidentally.

This is a top-notch novel from a writer I intend to watch closely in the future. And I've never lived on a military base in my life!