Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 1

Now at night it wasn’t robbers creeping up the stairs, but the Other June, coming to torment me. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of kicking her, punching, biting, pinching.

The dining-room table staggered on a bunched-up rug, our bureaus inched toward the front door like patient cows.

My mother drove over the crest of the hill.

I followed her around in a daze. Had I imagined seeing the Other June?

“Good riddance to bad trash,” she mocked.

Or maybe the messenger would have a telegram from Papa, who was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Montana because he had worked for a Japanese business firm.

The FBI had come to pick up Papa and hundreds of other Japanese community leaders on the very day that Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor. The government thought they were dangerous enemy aliens.

She was holding a package wrapped up like a birthday present, but she wasn’t wearing her party dress, and her face drooped like a wilted tulip.

But the garden looked shabby and forsaken now that Papa was gone and Mama was too busy to take care of it. It looked the way I felt, sort of empty and lonely and abandoned.

They were carrying guns with mounted bayonets. I wondered if they thought we would try to run away and whether they’d shoot us or come after us with their bayonets if we did.