House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  As her fascination with Max’s work grew, Anahola earned an advanced degree in biochemistry, became his lab intern, and eventually his assistant. It was extremely solitary work, perfect for a woman who had always proceeded at a tangent from the crowd. There was something urgent about sitting poised on a stool over a microscope, completely focused and alert; she lost all sense of artifice and vanity. The world outside melted away. Time itself seemed to dissolve, as a second world—the truer, minute world—made itself known to her.

  Such moments gave Ana a deep sense of fulfillment, as if she had finally found the answers to life, its riddles. When, in the future, she occasionally grew bored, suspecting she had not sufficiently challenged life, had not tested the limits of her daring and her drive, she would remember that first grueling year in Chinatown.

  … IT HAS BEEN FOUR YEARS SINCE ANAHOLA LEFT THE ISLANDS and one day Max asks her to accompany him to a conference on immunology. It will be held on the outer island of Kaua‘i, a forty-minute flight from Honolulu. At first she is terrified, fearing the island will take her hostage again. But he is a kind man, and has asked for very little. Her company would give him pleasure.

  When they arrive, she is extremely uncomfortable at the Coco Palms Hotel, hating the nightly blowing of the conch shell, the theatrical torch-lighting ceremony on the lagoon, entertainment geared for tourists. As she enters the dining room, men lift their heads like game dogs tracking spoor. Pale-shouldered women stare with anthropological interest. She sees herself through their eyes: rich, honey-colored skin, full lips, a languid sultry body. Except for the waiters, she is the only nonwhite in the room. She pulls herself in, her movements exaggeratedly chaste, and makes her way to the table.

  In one glance the staff of the hotel recognizes her as local, and that she is this older man’s kept woman. As Max becomes engaged in seminars, she is left more and more alone. Painfully self-conscious, she wears suits and high heels even to breakfast. She ignores the maids. But after a few days she begins to lose her bearings. The perfumed island air becomes a drug, making her eyelids heavy. Flowers drop in her lap, big and pale like the ears of priests waiting to hear her confession.

  An old bronzed man with aged-dove hair sits mending a fishing net, “talking story” like tūtū men from her childhood. She hears the blending of Pidgin and Hawaiian Mother Tongue that in the mouths of soft-voiced elders becomes intrinsically poetic. One night, hearing the wounded music of the sea, she runs barefoot to the beach and dives into moon-shot waves. She feels the harmony of things, the bliss of letting go. She thinks of the child and her ‘ohana.

  The next day she takes a forty-minute flight to Honolulu, then a cab out to the west coast. She stares at the stark Wai‘anae Mountains, at cattle thirsty for so-plenty rain. Alongside the highway are trash bags spilling chicken heads, used-up cans of Roach Motel. Skinny poi dogs run in packs. Kids in an abandoned truck seem to be sniffing glue rags.

  At a traffic light, a woman pulls up beside them in a car that looks welded together from many cars. Her face is bruised, one eye shut. She sees the cabbie staring and leans out of the window.

  “Ey! Wha’ choo looking at, manong?” Then she floors the gas and takes off.

  The Filipino driver glances at his passenger in the rearview, a pretty woman in a suit. “Rough neighborhood out here. Sure you know where you going?”

  Anahola smiles at him. “This town holds all of my mistakes.”

  They turn up Keola Road and drive past a pond where piggeries discharge their waste, past an old school bus oxidized to rust, then small neat houses with pretty yards full of flapping laundry. They turn into the potholed driveway of the house.

  In high heels and a pongee suit, she stands in the living room amongst them, self-consciously handing out cartons of cigarettes and See’s Candy from San Francisco. She has forgotten to take her shoes off at the door; the family stares as her heels sink into termite-ridden floorboards. She totters slightly, stylish, well cared for, out of place.

  Yet here she is to show that she has not forgotten them. She sits and drinks a beer that someone offers, and dips her hand into a bag of soggy, boiled peanuts. Food seems to float across the room, great bowls cupped in big, dark hands. Laulau dripping good, good grease. Poi, and lomi salmon. Steaming mounds of rice and fish.

  While she eats, she glances round the room. Same old rusty flit gun on the windowsill. In the kitchen, same Bull Durham bag wrapped round the faucet for the drip. She shifts her weight, looking farther into the kitchen and sees the kerosene string still tied round each leg of the Frigidaire to ward off ants. Food relaxes her elders and makes them somewhat confident. They ask about California, the weather, about jobs. Do folks eat poi there? And kimchee? They do not ask who she is living with. She will tell them that in time. Or not.

  “How is Uncle Noah?” she asks.

  They laugh, pointing to his room, where he sits at his window, a sentry at his post. Later, she knocks and steps into his room. “Noah. Pehea oe?” How are you.

  He turns from the window, her father’s younger brother who saw too much combat in Korea.

  She moves forward and holds him. “Don’t hate me. I had to go. I had to.”

  What she wants is for him to say that it’s all right. That life will be right. Instead, he pulls her to the window and they gaze out for a while. His hands are broad like her father’s had been and now he takes one of her hands in his, following her lifeline with his finger. He turns it over, smoothing her knuckles, then balls her hand into a fist and squeezes it over and over, as if to say, Be strong. Be strong.

  For a while she sits in the bedroom with little Ana, surrounded by rickety bamboo furniture, and old flower leis gathering bugs and mildew on the walls. She smokes a cigarette, watching the child dig under the sheets, hiding from her, too frightened to talk to her. Each time she reaches out her hand, the girl scuttles deeper and deeper away from her, so that only her feet show, sienna-tinted from red dirt.

  “Who can blame you?” she whispers.

  Wanting to give her privacy, folks had moved out to the lānai. Now she stands in the living room alone, and in the silence hears the drip. drip. of stewed guava sieving through a cheesecloth. She knows it will drip all night for ‘ono guava jelly. She writes a check and leaves it discreetly under the sugar bowl. Finally, she steps outside and hugs each one good-bye, then slides into the cab, still smelling stewed guava, and the iron-rich soil of Nanakuli.

  KULA ‘IWI

  Here My Bones Began

  THE SUMMER OF HER TENTH YEAR WAS SO DRY, BARKING DEER stumbled down from distant mountains, licking windows of air-conditioned stores. The piss of boar-hounds sizzled on tar. Ana watched mongooses crawl under their house, coughing and sucking at the pipes, while everywhere the earth cracked open like a gourd. In ancient times the word for wealth was waiwai, double water, for it was the fundamental element in their lives. Now elders stood in fields, praying to Kāne, keeper of water. But no rains came.

  Instead, a letter from her mother. A word that always silenced her. Through the envelope Ana smelled the woman’s perfume. She heard her smoky voice. Rosie read the letter to her through a closed door, so it would not mark her. Afterwards, she burned it. Watching the pages curl to embered rags, she recalled her mother’s visit two years earlier. On that day folks had rushed out to the lānai. A woman stood there in a silk suit that flowed down her hips and legs like water. She was wearing toe-pinch high heels, a matching handbag.

  Rosie had put her arms round Ana protectively. “Your mama.”

  Her vision blurred, she felt her heart pulsing in her shoulders. “What’s her name?”

  “Anahola. Same as you. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let her take you.”

  As the family moved indoors, the woman gliding in the midst of them, the girls had run to their bedroom and shut the door. Yet she could smell her mother’s perfume breaking down the walls.

  “What does she want?”

  “Nothing. She just came back
to look and see.”

  For hours they listened to rags of conversation, imagining blue smoke coiled in the air as uncles sucked on cigarettes, exhaling audibly like runners at the tape. She heard her mother’s voice, a strange and foreign-sounding voice from which all Pidgin-richness had been rinsed. She heard the sharp staccato of her mother’s high heels. She had not removed them at the door.

  Hours had passed, a half-moon rose. Rosie dragged her off to bed. When Ana woke, the woman was sitting beside her, studying her face. She had whispered something soft. Hello. Ana pulled back, terrified.

  “They say you’re smart … a good girl … one day you will understand. When you’re grown, you’ll see things differently … the world is always waiting to ambush a woman.”

  She looked beautiful, unreal. She sat in the dimness smoking, turning the room into a dream.

  “You’re better off here, with family …”

  She had crushed the cigarette, then bent to kiss Ana’s cheek, but the girl recoiled, scrambling under the sheet. Her mother had sighed and patted her foot like a little paw. She left her cigarette case behind. When Ana found it on the bed, she stroked its buttery-soft leather, reading tiny gold words in a corner. Genuine calfskin. Ben mailed the case back to San Francisco, and for years Ana thought of her mother as a woman who carried her cigarettes in a former calf. And she thought of San Francisco as a place women went to who did not want to be mothers.

  NOW, WATCHING THE LETTER TURN TO ASH, SHE HEARD A SUBTLE whispering, felt a dampness on her back. At last, at last, the rain. A gentle rain, like mist, that brought earth back to life gradually, almost thoughtfully. In the months of the Dry, taro leaves a full foot in diameter had knotted up like papery fists. Now they slowly unfurled, stretching out like great green hands. Ana reached out to them, letting her body go.

  The rains continued for three days while folks ran through the fields with their faces up, mouths open like flowers, their ankles socked in wet red clay. Only Rosie moved alone, her big body steaming in the wet, arms lifting dreamily like something adrift on the ocean floor. Then she seemed to pivot and go rigid, aiming her body and her profile at some distant point.

  At fifteen she had discovered dancing, that when she danced, she did not limp. She began to smell of aftershave. Someone was teaching her to tango.

  One night she knelt beside Ana’s bed. “I’m in love. With Gum, father of little Taxi.”

  Ana sat up scared. “You crazy? What about your mama?”

  “She never loved him. Or anyone.”

  Gum, the tango dancer, tried to explain it to Rosie’s mother, Ava. Hearing her screams, both girls ran up the road, on into the valley, toward deep, ridged mountains that swallowed them. For hours they climbed up lava boulders, clinging to roots and knotted vines. Up to their refuge behind a hidden waterfall, formed through centuries in the flutings of the rocks. Years back when they first braved the falls, they had discovered behind them an eerie grotto draped in moss, full of scattered bones.

  Now, crawling behind those thundering drapes, they fell exhausted into the cave, into man-shaped hollows centuries old. In the dimness, bones glowed blue and green. They lay down side by side feeling warmth from the sun the earth had swallowed. They were children again, cradled in stone.

  “Sometimes I see things,” Rosie whispered. “I hope they don’t see me. I hope they don’t come after me.”

  Ana suspected Rosie was afraid she would inherit her mother’s and grandmother’s craziness. It seemed to run in that line of females.

  “Do you think your mama’s mama did the same things to her?”

  “Maybe. Maybe if Mama shaved her head, we’d see the scars.”

  They stayed behind the falls all night and in those hours Rosie tried to change her life. Take it off like a coat, leave it behind.

  “I’m a woman now. Next time Mama hit me, I strike back.”

  The next day they shot out of those falls like bullets, plunging feet-first into a swirling stream. Ben, out searching for them with his boar-hounds, found them exhausted on the rocks. They marched home like women warriors, full of resolution.

  Ava must have sensed it. She never mentioned Gum, but at night she stood in Rosie’s room, staring at the empty bed. One day Ana heard little Taxi scream, then muffled silence. Blue moons appeared on his arms and legs, small bruises the size of a pinch. Ben saw them, too, and started throwing furniture, telling Ava to get out for good, he would raise her kids. She fell to her knees, pleading. Ben relented and she stayed, but he sent the child, Taxi, to his father.

  For days Ava sat in her room, whispering and rocking. Then without warning, she stood in Ana’s doorway, crept close and, with dreamy precision, tapped Ana’s hand.

  “Your papa was real mischief. He once put a lizard in my handbag.”

  Ana sat stunned. She felt like something with its mouth stitched shut. “You knew my father?”

  “The cop. Ho! What a dancer.”

  She leaned so close, Ana saw her fillings, blue-black as lava. Strands of saliva clung to the roof of her mouth.

  “I had him first you know. But he was nothing. He just lived. I gave him to your mama.”

  Ana looked her in the eye. “What was his name? What happened to him?”

  “Johnny. Shot to death. That’s what men do. They shoot each other.”

  She stood up, full of hate. “I don’t believe you. You’re crazy, you beat your kids. Look at Rosie … all those scars.”

  “Scars make her interesting.” Ava’s skin grew tight, her cheekbones whittled down to knuckles. “Where’s my boy, Taxi?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  She grabbed Ana’s wrist. Shook it like a club. “You get him back. Else I burn this house down.”

  One night Ana woke, gasping for air. She had been dreaming of the sea, and now her dream of water was put out by flames, the sounds of men shouting. Uncle Tito flew past her in his wheelchair. Someone lifted her and ran. Then the bright yellow jackets of firemen, their hoses snaking through the yard. Only Ava’s room had gone up, charred bits of which now fluttered in the smoky air, then descended with infinite listlessness.

  They found her semiconscious with her neck slashed, having attempted to cut her jugular. The box of matches beside her. She followed her mother to Kāne’ohe State Hospital, and for weeks folks drove past their burned house taking pictures. Ana ran out with Ben’s old camera and shot back.

  It took two years to repair the house and shortly thereafter her mother showed up in her life again. Still exuding that steady, quiet perfume. Folks dispersed, leaving them alone. From the kitchen, the empty sea sound of a ticking clock telling the wrong time. Ana was wearing ragged shorts and roller skates, elbow and knee pads.

  Her mother puffed a cigarette, creating a nice boundary of fog between them. “Hello, Ana. You look like a roller-derby queen.”

  For a while she just stared. When she spoke her voice was rough and careless. “Why you keep coming back? What you want from me?”

  “Well … what do you think I deserve?”

  “Nothing.” Perspiration made her aware of the shape of her face, so similar to her mother’s.

  “Ana. You have no idea …”

  “Don’t tell me what I have and don’t have. You don’t know nothing about me.”

  Her mother stood and walked into the kitchen. She reached out and set the hands of the clock right, then drank a glass of water at the sink. She wrote a check, left it on the counter, and moved to the front door. There she paused, gazing through the rusty screen, addressing her daughter behind her.

  “I’m thirty-two years old. If I had stayed here, I would be locked up now. Like Ava. I’m not trying to apologize. I love you. And I think of you. But I made a decision, and stuck to it.” She turned and looked at Ana. “May you have such convictions.”

  The girl cursed her and left the room. Her mother pushed open the door, hugged the family, and carefully walked down the steps to the waiting cab.

  WHY
AVA WAS RELEASED FROM KĀNE‘OHE STATE SEVERAL YEARS later was never clear. Crowded wards. Her age, her edges soft and blurred. Ben signed the papers and they brought her home. In her absence her boy had been brought home, too, and each day Noah sat in a chair rocking him to and fro. That’s how Ana knew how much he loved little Taxi.

  Now Ava wore an ink-colored wig, and most days her forehead was pressed to her bedroom wall, telling her confession. Her eyes empty craters, her neck a pearly grid of scars. When Ana passed her room, Ava turned and ran at her headfirst, then jerked back like something leaping the length of its chain. She didn’t remember the girl. But she remembered Taxi, the child they had stolen from her.

  And she started on Rosie again, whispering outside her door, lurid, obscene things no daughter should have heard. Ben packed Rosie’s bags, planning to send her to cousins in Pearl City, but she retreated, up to her elbows in pastries. Gum, the tango man, had moved to Seattle, and after that, Rosie stopped dancing, she stopped everything. All she did was eat. Ava kept stalking her, and then she stalked little Taxi, baring her teeth at him as if she might consume him.

  Ben watched her closely and kept the child beside him. But, then, emerging from a midnight swoon, he saw the child was gone. They found Taxi unconscious in Ava’s bed, her hands clasped tight, trying to crush his windpipe.

  “You not taking him from me again. I warned! I warned!” In the ensuing struggle she bit Ben’s arm down to the bone.

  Little Taxi survived, the bruises faded from his neck, and he was sent to his father in Seattle.

  Lightning season came, the air so electric the fillings in their teeth hummed. Everything they touched just sparked. There were flash floods, the seas gave off a yellow glow. For days, lightning zigzagged up the valley. It hit a wild pig that rolled into their yard completely roasted. One night, herringbones of ions, lightning striking everywhere. No one saw Ava leave the house. But they heard her awful scream, and found Ben standing over her, his hair electrified a gaseous blue.