Sisters and Friends
Chapter 25
Settling In for the Long Haul
"I want one of these things," Annie smiled, driving the last of the nails into her new bed frame. She reached over and shut off the little compressor, setting the air nailer back into its case. "Jane sure has a lot of tools."
"Comes with her boyfriend being the BFAC sculpture lab manager," smirked Quinn. "That and the lab being closed for the Christmas holiday."
Quinn regarded the simple structure. It was stable; a low platform with rolling plastic storage bins below. Annie had covered the top with fabric, stapled along the edges from the underside. A similar panel, screwed to the end, created a headboard and a vertical plane that small wood drawer cases attached to, serving as bedside tables. Cheap, strong, and elegant. A latex mattress and a comforter would finish it off, and as Annie said, the supporting structure that they had just put together in less than half an hour would never be noticed.
"I should have made something like this," said Quinn.
"Yeah, but your Ikea bed frame will be a lot easier to move." She gave Quinn a sly grin. "You could move it away from the wall a little, though."
Quinn reddened. "Sorry." She and Haroun did get a little noisy from time to time.
Annie laughed. "Jane's right. You and your sister are so much alike sometimes."
"Did she talk about the Barksdale libido? I will get Daria to help me strangle her."
"No, she was talking about how easily you two blush sometimes." Annie grinned. "Just like that!"
Quinn facepalmed. "Maybe we should go to his place."
Annie shook her head. "I don't mind. Look, Quinn, you're young, he's a great guy and you're both really into each other. This is our place. Heck, you were the one that found it." Annie grinned, pulling out a little plastic Ziploc bag from her pocket. "Besides, Jane gave me some earplugs."
Quinn looked in the styrofoam cooler on the kitchen counter, noting that Annie had already packed the scalloped potatoes and the steamed veggies. They had all agreed to have dinner over at Daria, Trent and Jane's place.
"Sorry I ran late," she called out. "Trent's cooking a pot roast, and I don't wanna miss that." God, my sister is so lucky. She's gotten to be a pretty good cook, but Trent's great. Hopefully Jane won't try to help. She's the only one I know that can burn water.
Quinn wandered over to the doorway, wondering if Annie was ready to go. It had been a hectic week, with Sara, Helen and Jake all 'helping' to move Annie up to Boston. She had driven up a few days before with her mom's car packed with most of her stuff, followed by the folks in Helen's new SUV. It was the Christmas break, after all, and the parents were bound and determined to use Annie's move as an excuse for a visit. Thank God Dad had managed to get one of his old clients to get them a suite at a Boston hotel at a steep discount.
Dad had even managed to talk Mom into letting him bring Fiona along, who had happily stayed with Daria, Trent and Weevil for the duration of the visit. It had been fun, sure, but Quinn was quite prepared to talk Trent into opening a bottle of wine for the evening to toast the relative quiet, now that the parents had retreated.
"What's all that stuff?" The table was covered with a sheet of clean white paper, and was scattered with rolls of what looked like black and gray plastic. Annie had been examining them with a magnifying loupe, and attaching little Post-it labels. Their half-assed attempt at Christmas decorating, a potted plant buried in tinsel, had been moved to the coffee table.
"My mom gave me my grandfather's old camera and some of his negatives. He shot these in France, during the war."
Quinn hesitated before responding, remembering the awful photos of Annie's Grandfather, taken in the field hospital where his leg was amputated. "Are they- you know, of people?"
"Those are," Annie sighed, indicating a box on the floor. "But these are of buildings, I think in Normandy. I guess the interest in architecture was kind of hereditary. Most of these are of churches and cathedrals, pretty badly damaged by bombs and shells. Grandpa took pictures of the parts that were still standing, and it kind of shows how strong some of these structures were."
"Sounds more like engineering," Quinn said, picking up one of the rolls. It was hard to figure out what the photos were, since the dark and light parts were reversed.
"Sort of, but these are basic structural elements. Barrel vaults, groin vaults, flying buttresses, that kind of stuff. All made of stone, hundreds of years old and still standing after a five hundred pound bomb goes off. They knew how to build things, even without computers."
Quinn took the loupe that Annie offered. "Jane has a really good scanner. Maybe you can reverse the tones in Photoshop or something." She looked at the clock on the wall. "Hey, just bring the box. We gotta go."
Quinn wiped her hands on a kitchen towel as the last of the pots and pans were put away. They had decided to share a meal at least once or twice a week, since their households were so close together. She and Daria helped themselves to more wine before bringing the bottle out to the living area.
Dad's looking older these days. I never noticed that gray in his hair before; I guess running Mosaic is a lot of work, even though he really seems to enjoy it. I'm glad it's doing okay; at least it's starting to cover my tuition and living expenses. God knows I could have tried harder like Daria to help out with scholarships.
At least Dad's cooking has improved, according to Mom. Sara's been teaching him a lot, so at least his time in the kitchen is actually becoming more satisfying than frustrating. And Fiona's looking a little chubby, too. Bet that cat's getting pretty spoiled, now that Daria and I are out of the house.
"This is a cool camera," Jane smiled, playing with the old instrument that was in the box of negatives. "Are you gonna try taking pictures with it?" She felt for the hidden button and pushed it, making the front open up and exposing the lens.
"Hey, how the heck did you do that?" Annie looked over from her laptop. "I couldn't figure out how to get it to unfold like that."
"The latch is here, hidden under the leather," Jane showed her the little bump on top. "My dad had one like this but his was broken." She turned the lens ring, making little whirring sounds. Cocking and releasing the shutter, she tried it at different speeds. "This thing is in great condition. All the shutter speeds are working. Even the self-timer is okay. Not bad for a camera that's over seventy years old." Holding it up, she squinted through the viewfinder. "Wow. Even the rangefinder is working!"
Quinn smiled, watching Haroun playing with Weevil. "How do you know so much about these old cameras?"
"My dad kinda collected them. You know he's a pretty well known photographer. He gave me my first camera when I was five. This one, he'd never trust me with when I was little. This is a Zeiss Super Ikonta folding rangefinder. High speed lens, coupled rangefinder, 645 format on 120 film. You get 16 pictures per roll. Pretty fancy, and probably still worth a lot to a collector. You can still get film for these things."
Annie was intrigued. "They still make film?"
"Sure. I can ask Gary in the photo department. I think they keep a stock for students to buy at cost." Jane went back to digging in the box. She pulled out a small leather case hanging from a lanyard apparently meant to go around a user's neck. "Hey! You've got a light meter in here too! Wait, this one is pretty recent. Like from the 1970's or something."
"Mom said that she got this stuff from my cousin Barry. Maybe he was using the camera."
"That would explain why everything still works…He must have had it serviced."
Annie saved the images she had scanned and processed to a USB drive. Jane was still playing with the camera, and was pointing it at her. Annie could see the reflection of herself and the computer monitor in the curved glass, set in its engraved black shutter. That lens has seen so much misery, pain and death.
She thought back to the other negatives, the ones of people, still rolled up in the box. She had avoided looking at some of the frames too closely, once she saw enough to know what the photo was of. Still, there were some that were of other American soldiers in Grandpa's unit, some more boys than men, soldiers that had fought alongside him.
She did run across one relatively innocuous frame amid the ones of the buildings; her grandfather sitting on ruined stone steps with a few other exhausted soldiers. They were loading cartridges from open ammunition cans into clips, or cleaning their weapons. A couple of them were smoking cigarettes, another unscrewing the cap of his canteen. All of them were Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans, soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The composition was off, not even level, clearly taken by someone other than Seiyei Tamashiro. That was him, sitting to the left of center, his M1 carbine across his knees and a clip of ammunition in his hand. He was still whole, and he gazed back through more than seventy years into the eyes of the granddaughter he was doing all of this for.
Annie looked around her, at her friends; they had all managed to get enough of their lives in some semblance of order, and were resolutely set on achieving something worthwhile.
She remembered her Mom telling her that the 442nd had a slogan, one that had its roots in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii, where a lot of the boys were from.
Go For Broke. Hold nothing back, bet everything. Her grandfather had been willing to give everything to help the next generation be accepted as Americans, to make sure they had the opportunities to succeed. By the grace of God he himself had lived, and long enough to see his grandchildren.
Her Grandfather had died when she was little, and she had only known him as her kind and gentle Oji-chan that loved her dearly. She remembered staring at the burnished bronze box that sat amid a spray of orchids, with a photograph of her Grandpa as a young man in an Army uniform. She had thought the box was pretty until she learned from a sullen teenaged cousin Barry that it contained the ashes of her beloved Grandfather.
If it was solid gold it wouldn't be good enough. She remembered thinking that when she sat through his funeral, and it had made her sad for a very long time. It had not prepared her in the least for the death of her father years later.
Getting through the Architecture program at Raft would be hard work, but she knew that the fight was in her blood, both from the Tamashiro and the Nichols families. Nothing less than success would be acceptable.
Not try, do.
Annie closed her eyes for a moment, and only Quinn noticed the look of determination that had set the line of her jaw.