DREAMS OF YÔKO SHIMADA

Dick Ziminski was on the beach in back of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel while his friend, Fran, was asleep on a straw mat alongside him. At the moment, Dick was transfixed watching a Japanese girl spread out a large beach towel near the other side of the hotel’s beach front, and even more attentive as she removed an oversized Columbia sweatshirt from her lithe body. She had a new straw beach bag like the ones he saw in the hotel arcade. Taking a swimming cap from her bag, she walked across the public part of the beach and waded into the surf while carefully folding her hair in under her cap. She waited for the first wave to break in front of her and then moved quickly to dive under the next one and out the other side with a smooth, effortless stroke. While Dick was a strong swimmer himself, he could easily tell she had been professionally trained. He watched her head roll rhythmically to the side with every third stroke until she was way out.

Finally his attention shifted to another demanding sport. There were a couple of teams of young men – probably servicemen, most likely navy – who were out to exhaust one another. Each crew would take one of the long outrigger canoes and paddle out about two-hundred yards against the tide. There they would turn their boats around and wait for a large wave to take shape behind them. Then came the mad race, trying to stay ahead of the massive wave and be the first boat to reach the shore. And as if that weren’t enough, they jogged back and forth along the water’s edge between races. Dick remembered football practice at Lehigh for being demanding, but this nonstop boat racing and jogging was exhausting just to watch.

He tried to see if he could spot the Japanese girl again but it took too long to examine each wave in the glare of the sunlight. Besides there were so many interesting sights competing for his attention. He let his eyes scan the long, unbroken curve of sand that seemed to extend all the way down to Diamond Head. Then in from the beach, a line of palm trees and hotel patios where in a few hours the luaus would begin. Yes, it was hard to take, for someone like himself who spent much of his time around the smokestack-end of heavy industry. Repairing and installing pollution control equipment such as electrostatic precipitators (ESP) which was his specialty. This trip, too, would be more of the same, except that he would be inspecting someone else’s engineering design, and when the day was over he’d be having dinner in Tokyo instead of Pittsburgh or Youngstown. It’s what companies call a perk.

After what seemed like an hour, he searched the horizon again for the lost Mermaid. Only this time he saw that precise, freestyle stroke cutting through the water as the waves alternately lifted her up and let her down like a sign curve. When she reached the shore, she was a good fifty yards further down the beach than where she had started. But instead of staggering out of the surf close to exhaustion, she merely shielded her eyes to get her bearings and then started walking toward the coral pink stucco of the Royal Hawaiian. Due to the shifting sun, Dick was no longer sitting completely in the shade of the palm trees and similarly noticed Fran pulling his baseball cap off to shield his face. Dick moved back and at the same time shifted his position so he could observe the girl’s towel without being too obvious about it.

“Fran, tell me again...this gorgeous creature you saw on TV, did she look like Esther Williams in a swim suit?” Dick knew all about Esther Williams because, when he was still living at home, his father would commandeer the TV if one of her movies was on.

An exasperated response came from beneath Fran’s cap. “I must have told you forty times, it was a TV mini-series based on James Clavell’s novel SHOGUN. The time period is 1600 so I don’t think bathing suits were invented yet.”

The girl reached into her bag for a towel to dry herself. Dick pulled the peak of his cap down like a pitcher concentrating on that last out. Then took his sunglasses off, wanting to get the full effect. She patted her face dry and then toweled off her shoulders and arms. ‘God, what beautifully molded arms,’ he marveled. Speaking over his shoulder to his buddy again, he refined the comparison. “I didn’t mean, if she was as big and tall as Esther Williams. I meant was she a perfect five-foot-four version with everything to match?”

Fran relented from his hard stance