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always did, placing the ball perfectly on almost every shot. It was so quiet that Lois could hear the creak of a swing set on the other side of the park, chain links shifting and straining. Every time Stephanie Ikeda hit the ball, she emitted a small grunt, like she’d been punched in the stomach, and Lois saw her own mother shake her head a little, glad her daughter didn’t make such ugly noises. The whole crowd cheered when a point was won, and Rose took the first set in half an hour.
    At the break, the people in the stands started into a quiet chatter, analyzing the first set, debating a questionable call made by one of the judges. Lois saw the gray clouds moving over them, closing and unclosing like fists, and she wondered if it was going to start raining. Her parents exchanged a few words and then fell silent again, and Lois thought, watching them, not for the first time, that she never wanted to marry. Marriage, to her, meant what her parents had—steadiness, like a small efficient business. Her parents never fought, but they didn’t hug either, or talk about anything that wasn’t related to the family or work. She knew that love could be more than that—more like Christy Hara and John Oyama from high school, who would vanish into Christy’s house in the afternoon and come out an hour later looking happy and relaxed; or like Dexter Coleman’s parents, who lived together but had never married, and who still cooked for each other, and sang songs together, and yelled, “Hey, baby!” when they met on the street.
    Steadiness, in any form, was stifling to her. She liked the extreme, the inexplicable, the ridiculous and evil. She liked her Grandma and Grandpa Takayas’ stories of the hustlers and pimps they served in the old days in Little Tokyo; of the gambling house where they wouldn’t let Mary make deliveries because of the desperate, devious men and shady women. She liked their stories of nine-month winters and planting rice on early mornings in Japan, and her grandmother Sakai’s tales of surviving on locusts, fried for crispness or boiled for soup. They were citizens now, all of them, transformed into Americans at the mass naturalization ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in ’54, but to Lois their stories of old Japan were like the best kind of fairy tales—fantastical, with familiar elements and odd but recognizable characters.
    During the second set, Lois’s attention wandered. She looked around at all the well-dressed husbands and wives, the tiny grandmothers with their plain, drab Western clothes and their bright, patterned Japanese fans. She watched a couple of bored-looking wives glance over at her father, who she knew was handsomer than any Gardena man. A better father, too, she believed. He was at the store every night until eight or nine, but then he was always at home, telling stories, teasing his daughters, never going out for drinks or card games like the other Nisei fathers she knew. He even took her to baseball games sometimes at Dodger Stadium, and before that, when the team had just moved out from Brooklyn, right over at the Olympic Coliseum. Rose, of course, wasn’t interested in baseball, but once or twice a summer, Frank and his friend Victor gathered a big group of kids and drove them all up to a game. Lois loved being around the men, for any reason—the deep sweet smell of Victor’s pipe, the easy way her father laughed when they sat on the stoop of Victor’s house, always made her feel secure. The two of them together were a sight to see, especially her father’s friend—all the women in the neighborhood, from fifteen to fifty, threw more sway in their hips, more spice and honey in their voices, when Victor Conway came around.
    At the break between the second and third sets—Stephanie Ikeda had taken the second set 6-3—Lois asked her mother where the bathroom was. Mary pointed at a small tan building about a hundred feet away from the court. “Can’t you wait?” she asked.