By PATRICIA IKEDA
The author as a baby with her mother, Alice Sawada Ikeda, in 1954, Ohio.
“Trick ‘r treat.”
I held open my pillowcase and felt the satisfying thud of candy dropping into it. We went on to the next house trailer, thrilled to be out in the dark, milling about with the other costumed kids on Halloween.
My four-year-old brother wore a cute leopard suit, with whiskers drawn on his cheeks in eyebrow pencil by my mother. For me, she’d cut down her white satin wedding dress so I could be a bride.
I’ve always thought this was odd, considering that some people save their wedding gowns as heirlooms, preserved in special cases and passed down, like jewelry, from generation to generation.
My mother wasn’t like that. She was a “use it or lose it” pragmatist, which was particularly good because our family started out living in a trailer park in Ohio. Our parents’ “master” bedroom was at the front of the trailer, and we three kids shared the bedroom at the back, with no room for extra possessions. We called where we lived “house trailers” in those days – they hadn’t been elevated to “mobile homes.” Basically, they were small boxcar apartments made of metal, on wheels.
That Halloween in 1959, when I was five years old, would be the only time I would ever dress in a white gown and wear a veil. I never saw my mom in that dress either, until I was an adult and first saw my parents’ wedding photo. This was because my parents never celebrated their wedding anniversary, at least not until their 25th, when they joined relatives, also celebrating their silver anniversary, and threw a party in Hawaii.
Some time after the party was announced, I figured out that my birthday was less than nine months after wedding,
“We’ve all realized that,” my sister said scornfully when I mentioned it.
My mother must have been pregnant with me at the time of her wedding. She wasn’t showing in the wedding portrait but I was there, somewhere underneath the dress. They look like a pleasantly happy group of Japanese Americans in that photo: Mom, Dad, my father’s mother and younger brother, and a young bridesmaid.
“Mom sure looks pretty in that picture,” my father said in the last year of his life.
“Yes she does,” I said. He had dementia, and it was generally wise to agree with his pronouncements. In this case, however, it was true. Both of my parents had been good-looking young adults.
My father and I gazed with satisfaction at the wedding photo.
“But who’s that man standing next to her?” Dad said.
I was surprised. “That’s you, Dad,” I replied. “This is your wedding picture.”
“No it’s not,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Patricia Y. Ikeda has published poetry, essays and autobiographical fiction in various literary magazines, anthologies, and Buddhist journals since the 1970s, under the names Patricia Y. Ikeda, Mushim Ikeda-Nash, and Mushim. Considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian American poetry, she and her work were featured in the award-winning film, Between the Lines: Asian American Women’s Poetry (http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c553.shtml).
