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Rodney looked like he wanted to cry, but Molly had observed him enough to know that he wouldn't. He never cried on the playground when the other kids called him names, he didn't let tears fall when Douglas Underwood shoved him into the mud and told him to eat dirt, and he never even flinched when Nellie Jones walked up to him and told him that his dad had killed a bunch of people at Pearl Harbor. No, Rodney Kobayashi was not a crier. He never let anyone see how he really felt, and this intrigued Molly.
"I am American," Rodney said, holding his head up and refusing to take the chalk from Miss Chambers. "I can say the 'Pledge of Allegiance' and my parents speak perfect English. I was born here, Miss Chambers, and I'm not writing that on the board."
It was a stunning display for a seven-year-old, and Molly's chin dropped. Her eyes volleyed back and forth between the teacher and this boy who seemed to have no fear. The other kids in the class suddenly perked up, aware that something interesting was happening.
"I don't care what you do to me, Miss Chambers. I'm not writing on your board." Rodney walked back to his spot on the rug and sat down, crossing his legs defiantly and hunching his shoulders over as his brows knit together stubbornly.
No sooner had he sat back down than Miss Chambers slammed the piece of chalk into the tray below the board, sending up a cloud of chalk dust. She stormed over to where Rodney was sitting, reached down with one manicured hand, and grabbed him by the ear, forcing him to his feet.
"I will not stand for this sort of disrespect and disobedience from a child whose family undoubtedly had some hand in the wholesalemurderof our country's young men. Even if your father didn't drop the bomb himself, I know damn sure that he supported it. You're all the same," Miss Chambers was muttering to herself angrily as she dragged Rodney through the doorway and out of the classroom.
Molly and her peers sat there on the carpet, looking back and forth from one face to the next, unsure about what they should do. As they waited, Miss Chambers's voice could be heard echoing down the linoleum tiled hallway, her words a tirade against Rodney, his family, the Japanese, the war...it went on and on until the children were alone. Teacherless. Puzzled. Silent.
Needless to say, Miss Chambers did not return the next day. Nor did Rodney. When he finally returned, there was a substitute teacher filling in, and this woman stayed until the end of the year. She wasn't as pleasing to the eye as Miss Chambers had been, but one thing about Mrs. Harper was that she was never mean to Rodney or to any other kid. In fact, she called everyone "Honey," or "Darling," and her grandmotherly face was like the peace and calm that followed a huge storm.
By the end of that school year, Molly had told all of her girlfriends that Rodney was going to be her husband.
By the fall of third grade, Rodney had vanished, and Molly forgot all about him.
* * *
It was never easy to love someone with a different background than yours. Okay, the loving part was easy, but the acceptance by other people--that was the hard part.
During Molly's junior year of high school, she sat in the back of her English class, elbows on her desk, eyes cast out the window at the blue California sky. There was a new boy in her homeroom class, and everything about him sent a thrill of recognition through her body. It wasn't a literal recognition, but more like an understanding that she knew him on a cellular level, a divine level, in a preordained way.
"Rodney Kobayashi," her friend Jemma Sawyer whispered that day in English class, leaning forward in the desk behind Molly's. "Remember? From Miss Chambers's class?"
Molly dragged her attention away from the window and refocused on the teacher at the front of the room. He was scribbling something on the chalkboard feverishly and pontificating about Jane Austen.
"Wait," Molly whispered, turning her head slightly so that Jemma could hear her without the teacher being alerted to their conversation. "The kid who refused to write on the board?"
"Yeah!" Jemma hissed. "Him!"
Well, okay, Molly thought, sinking back into her own daydream.Now I remember him. Rodney.
"Miss Kimble?" the teacher asked, spinning around with the chalk in one hand. He looked at her with narrow eyes. "Would you mind telling us what the central theme ofPride and Prejudiceis, and why that same theme is still important in our lives today?"
Molly fought hard against the impulse to roll her eyes. "Yes, Mr. Quinland," she said, sitting up straighter. "Pride and Prejudiceexamines the ways in which a woman's reputation is of the utmost importance. It's still relevant today because girls have to act a certain way, or people will cast us aside and mark us as not good enough, even though the same rules don't apply to boys and men." Molly smiled as sweetly as she could, folding her hands on top of her desk.
Mr. Quinland's mustache twitched like a mouse sniffing out a piece of cheese. His beady eyes stayed focused on hers. "And rightly so," he shot back, turning around and resuming his scrawling on the board.
Molly wanted to say more, but she knew better. This was 1973, after all--a time when women were beginning to question the status quo, but also a time when students were still expected to defer to their teachers, when children obeyed their parents, and when women ultimately fell in line and didn't continue to talk back to a man. Molly's comment alone could have been enough to warrant Mr. Quinland making a call home to her parents to complain about her impertinence, but she hoped that a friendly smile and a warm goodbye on her way out of the room might be enough to smooth things over with him. In her experience, it worked with most men, dazzling them enough so that they'd forget momentarily what she'd said, and perhaps even questioning if such a sweet girl could have possibly meant the kind of disrespect they'd momentarily felt.
Scrambling the brains of a man was fairly easy, in Molly's limited experience.
Talking to Rodney was also easy: she found his locker, walked right up to him after school as he was stacking his history and math books on the shelf, and tapped him on the shoulder.
"We were in Miss Chambers's class together," she said when he turned around. "My name is Molly Kimble."
"I remember you," he said simply, closing the door to his locker. "Do you want a ride home?"
Molly did want a ride home, and Rodney delivered her to her house in his rusted red 1950 Chevy pickup truck. And then he picked her up again for school the next day, and they went out on Friday night, visiting the only theater in their small California town, and they went to the junior-senior prom that year, and then five years later they were married on the beach, with both sets of parents in attendance and plenty of naysayers in the background of their lives, telling them it would never work--that they were too different, that no one would accept them.
But they were happy. They were together.
* * *
"Okay, wait, wait, wait," Tilly says, standing up in the middle of Marooned with a Book, holding a piece of garlic bread in one hand. "You justgot married? You met a guy in second grade, he showed up again in high school, and you lived happily ever after?"
