“That was almost two decades ago. We’ve made enormous progress since then.”
“Well, like you said, Dr. Lee, it’s my life. My choice.”
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple.” She fell momentarily silent, then pointed to Ana’s lab results.
“Please look at these again. You’re right, the cancer has not spread to your lymph nodes. That’s the good news. But, your particular cancer cells are highly undifferentiated. These are the most aggressive kinds of cells, which means …”
“… they spread like wildfire.”
“Exactly. Which is why I’m recommending a simple mastectomy.”
She switched on a light box, holding up a chest X-ray and a CAT scan. “This patient chose to have a lumpectomy. She had highly undifferentiated cancer cells, like yours. Eight months later, a simple mastectomy was necessary. Then, the other breast. Within a year, her lungs … her brain …”
After a while, Ana spoke. “All right. Only, please stop calling it a ‘simple’ mastectomy. It isn’t fucking simple.”
Dr. Lee switched off the light box. “No. It’s not. And, how well you psychologically survive this is up to you.”
She tried to smile. “So. Do you think it will make me a ‘believer’?”
The surgeon sat down and clasped her hands together on the desk. “Religion doesn’t hurt. Whatever gives you strength, grab it. Use it. Because afterwards, there will be grief. You’ll feel mutilated, ugly …”
She paused, looked out the window, then continued.
“At first you won’t be able to look at yourself naked in a mirror. For a while, maybe years, you won’t even think of men. Then, because you’re a fighter, something will begin to happen. You’ll change your focus from what you lost to what you want to keep. Your life.”
Ana tried for humor. “I think I know the drill. Meditation. Exercise. I’ll develop a warped sense of humor, maybe become a full-blown cynic. I’ll give up men. Buy a dog who loves me unconditionally. Maybe take up sky-diving …”
Dr. Lee unconsciously pressed her hand against her own right breast. Ana saw for the first time that it was completely flat.
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry. How did you get through it, Dr. Lee?”
“The hard way. First, lumpectomy, which was too late. Then simple mastectomy. In time I learned to forgive myself. You will too. So many women blame themselves, thinking they should have been vegetarians, avoided caffeine, should have had more orgasms.”
She patted the flat place rather tenderly. “Losing part of your body alerts you to its beauty, its miraculous intelligence—how it goes on functioning without your conscious thoughts. You begin to really love your body. To honor it.”
At the door to the office, Ana turned back. “This may sound unprofessional, even maudlin. But, afterwards I want to see my breast.”
“Of course. Many women ask to see the postop photos.”
“No, Dr. Lee. I mean I want you to … give … me … back … my breast after you remove it.”
The woman stared at her.
“It’s mine. It’s me. I want it back.”
ROSIE PUSHED HER SUITCASE THROUGH THE DOOR, KICKED OFF her shoes, and stood barefoot in a mu‘umu‘u. In spite of periodic diets, her great height and weight seemed to suck all light and space from Ana’s small apartment. Her beautiful face broke into a smile, showing gleaming, taro-tough teeth. She spread her massive arms, engulfing her.
She’s here. I’m safe, Ana thought. Even if I die, I’m safe.
Then Rosie pulled Ana to her side before a mirror. “My God, look at the size of us. A little tumor doesn’t have a chance.”
Weeks before Ana’s surgery, Rosie had begun to call on all the higher forces in the ritual of kūkulu kumuhana. She called on friends and family to fast and pray for Ana. Even her drug-running cousins in Halawa High Security Prison prayed. Now Rosie began her most intensive herbal healing.
“You are educated. You follow the modern ways of healing. That is good. You will do what they say. The surgery, the treatments after. But I am your elder, and now you will listen to me.”
Ana bowed her head. “I will always honor you.”
“From this time forward, we will begin to purify your body. No more whole food which slows elimination and therefore, purification. We will begin to starve the cancer cells. And how? The cancer cells know who they are. They will retreat from healthy cells. The healthy cells know who they are. When it comes time to ‘oki—cut!—the parting will be clean. We will ‘oki i na make. Cut out death.”
On the first night she walked Ana down to a secluded beach where the sea was mirror-calm.
“Now, cousin, kneel and let your knees remember kou one hānau. Your birth sands. Kneel so that ka mahina hou, the new moon, can see you are a red-soled girl of Wai‘anae. Let her bathe you from the crown of head to soles of feet, and four corners of the body while you pray.”
Ana knelt so that her toes rested in the sand. Then she opened her mouth and howled, breaking down doors her mind had tried to seal. Entering bright vacuums of pain.
Thereafter, each morning Rosie pounded the aerial root of the hala tree, squeezed out the juice and made Ana drink it five times daily. Three times a day she fed her seeds of whole papaya.
“Chew. Swallow slowly. Dwell on the journey of the cleansing seeds.”
At night before Ana slept, Rosie brewed her potent tea from ‘awa root, the slightly narcotic tea for curing stress and grief. By the fifth day, Ana felt she was floating just above the ground, her body an empty vessel.
“I feel light-headed. Lighthearted. I feel … content.”
“Good. We have cleansed you back to innocence.”
The morning of Ana’s surgery, Rosie was there when they prepped her. And as they sedated her, Rosie bent and pressed her fingers to her eyelids, to her lips, her breast, and her na‘au, her gut, which was the heart of the healing mind. As orderlies pushed Ana’s gurney toward the operating room, Rosie followed behind, slapping the walls with ti leaves for safe journey. Her chanting was the last thing Ana heard.
“Mauli-‘ola, God of Healing. Hear me now! … Ē ho‘i ka ‘iwi I ha‘i I kona wahi iho … A pela no ho‘i I ka ‘i‘o o kona wahi iho … A pela me ke‘a’a olona, e ho‘i lakou me ko … Lakou wahi iho …”
Return to its own place the bone that is broken … and so of course, the flesh to its own place … and so, the veins, the arteries, the tendons and the muscles … each to their own places. Merciful God. Hear me now.
WHEN SHE WAS WELL ENOUGH ROSIE TOOK HER HOME. PAU HANA time, traffic on the freeway crawled, until finally, they reached the coast. Women in crumbling slippers dragged wagons filled with artificial meat. Signs advertising, SPAM SPECIAL. ONE DAY ONLY. And lining the horizon left to right, rusted TV antennas, the unharvested crop of her valley.
They turned up Keola Road, and as tarmac disappeared beneath red dirt, Ana felt a softening—plants reaching out with green spatulate hands as if to take her in. Turning into their driveway, she heard music amplified across the fields, so loud their windshield seemed to vibrate.
Rosie shook her head. “Noah found old records someone left. He’s welcoming you home.”
They flooded from the house, their arms outstretched. Ben, aunties, everyone. There were times Ana had thought she hated them, their endless tragedies and scandals. Absent fathers, come-and-go mothers, kids left behind like dog packs. She had hated the way the walls seemed to bulge, as if the house itself kept giving birth. She even hated the way her uncles’ fingers, stained with nicotine, left sordid yellow traces on their coffee cups.
But sometimes when she looked at them, there was nothing else. Each elder and child always engaged in some small task that made them unique and important, so that they survived another day with something quietly accomplished. Something that changed them each and all, made them better or worse, proud or ashamed, but left them engraved, and closer. Letting them enfold her now, Ana understood that without this family,
her ‘ohana, the outside world was nothing.
It had been a drought-filled summer. At night she lay in her girlhood bed feeling the mattress as lumpy as bird bones, but sheets fresh and smelling of wild ginger. The dryness of the land was echoed in the parched, itchy feeling of the stitches across her chest. She squeezed her hands into fists, fighting the urge to scratch them. Instead, she drank Rosie’s ‘awa tea and let herself relax and drift as one by one, her family appeared and tried to comfort her.
Rosie showed Ana big scars across her buttocks where she had sat on a barbecue grill. “Remember what my mama said. ‘Scars makes us interesting.’ ”
One-armed Ben came, bringing the smell of eucalyptus and kukui leaves. These he had twisted till their juices ran, then wrapped them round his stump when it ached, longing for its arm.
“Leaves help da stump fo’get,” he said, rubbing it briskly. “One day you going put leaves on yo’ chest. I going bless and twist dem fo’ you.”
He talked to her for hours, softly, as if wanting to be overheard, not heard. He spoke with exquisite politeness about her loss, and how to overcome that loss. He said such wise and noble things she could not answer, afraid she would break down.
“Remember, Ana, you get scared, no can sleep. Waiho kenā I ke ākua!” Take it to the gods.
At night she heard the family talking extra-loud, and when they slept they snored to beat the band, reminding her they were there for her. When she lay down they all lay down. She wondered if their lives would ever be vertical again.
Tito came, spinning his wheelchair into her room. Up close, his left hand still had an enduring “ear smell” from wiggling his pinkie in his ear when he played poker. He was wearing a clean white shirt, so that his bronze skin glowed. He struggled to speak “proper” English for her.
“Ana. When I hear you get da Big C, I stood up from dis chair, took four steps, and punched one big hole in da wall. First time I walk in twenty years.”
He took her hands and squeezed them. “You going beat dis thing. You hear? You beat dis, I going walk clear to da highway fo’ you.”
They told her Noah could not come. Always discreet, he didn’t want to cry in front of her. But sometimes late at night he stood outside her window, and blew smoke rings into her room. Rosie’s girl, Makali‘i came. Now thirteen, she had reached the age of defiance and walked around with her shoulders hunched, ignoring everyone. Only Ana gained access to her conversation.
“Mama said you had an operation. You okay?”
The girl had always been devoted to her, and now seemed devotedly awestruck because Ana had her own place in the city. She was going to be a beauty, but just now she seemed timorous and clumsy, slightly overweight. Ana could see the craving for sexual grace, and attention.
“I’m going to be fine. How’s school, Makali‘i?”
“A drag. Everything’s a drag. I want to die.”
“No, you don’t. You want to finish school and come and visit me in Honolulu.”
She nodded vigorously, she smiled. But somehow her eyes did not participate.
Aunty Pua came with her pedantic cleanliness, her face sad and chalky like old eucalyptus leaves. Having forsaken the Christian Bible again, she sat gripping the KUMULIPO, the book of the Hawaiian Hymn of Creation.
“Ana, this book the only truth. ‘He po uhe’e I ka wawa he nuku … It is night gliding through the passage of an opening.’ That’s how we began, so simple. All came from P?, the night.”
She took Ana’s hand in hers. “You will never, never be alone. More than a hundred gods stay all around you. Look like they tested you, pushed you into Hikawainui, the strong near-drowning current, to see how brave you are. Then they carried you into Hikawaina, the calm current, to let you rest and catch your breath. You swam the current well! Now you are mending and at peace, and nothing left to fear.”
Some nights Pua dipped into a bowl of fish eyes while she read from the KUMULIPO. “‘Hānau ka ‘uku oko‘ako‘al Hānau Kana, He ako‘ako‘a Puka … Born the coral polyp/ Born of him a coral colony emerged … ’ ”
She savored each fish eye like a delicacy, rolling it round on her tongue. Then her head began to droop, the book sliding from her lap. Sometimes in sleep her jaw dropped. Ana watched an eye slip slowly from her mouth.
AND THERE WAS ONE WHO CAME QUIETLY LIKE A SHADOW. HE came at the end of a pain-filled day, when she was sleepless and exhausted. He sat beside her bed, and took her hand in his big hand and held it like a little stone.
“Ei nei. How are you? I thought you might like to know that it is evening.”
“Lopaka. I think I must look awful.”
Through her nightgown he saw the golden marimba of her ribs.
“A little thin. But you are always beautiful to me.”
Her teeth felt caulked with medications. She struggled to sit up and smooth her hair. He eased onto the edge of her bed and when he spoke his voice was soft and low, threatening to break down all resistance. The trick for her was not to cry.
“I ever tell you how I carried your letters all through ’Nam? I sat in trenches full of blood, picturing you flying kites the way I taught you. My Ana, standing in a field.”
He moved closer and she smelled his skin, his hair, his maleness. She studied his brown shoulders and his arms, knowing that any other man who came into her life would be measured against him.
Now he spoke as he had when she was a child. Their secret language, a kind of code. He told her how ever since her childhood, she had given fullness to his life. In dark moments, she had made him want to live. While he talked, she felt her lungs open, felt herself move back inside a young girl’s skin.
“It seems to me I ought to beg your pardon for the years I messed up after ‘Nam. Drinking, drugging, running with a gang.”
He touched the tattoo just below his eye. The shape of a teardrop—a gang symbol for one who had killed, or maimed, or been to prison.
“After combat, I was just so full of death. Sometimes I sat in the dark and laughed. I understood that things would never be all right again. I knew you were waiting for me, Ana. I didn’t come to you because I was ashamed. You had outgrown me.”
“I never outgrew you,” she whispered. “But I have always wondered … how did you finally pull yourself together?”
He hesitated, then slowly rolled up his pant leg, carefully unstrapped his leg brace, and showed her what was left. She had never seen the leg without the brace. Now she stared openmouthed at what looked like a ferociously scarred and pitted, badly dented log. It looked like an artifact.
“One day I came out of a weeklong drunk and this leg was cold and gray. No circulation. I thought of gangrene, how they would have to take it off. For a while after my discharge, I wanted amputation. I couldn’t stand to look at it. But now I realized it was still my leg. It just looked different. I went back into physical therapy. Stopped drinking and drugging. I got so wrapped up in healing myself, I just kept going. Books. Law school. Who knows why we decide to live again?”
Now he patted the leg. “I’m learning to respect it. Even love it.”
He looked down at the leg, and suddenly he sobbed, his big hands covering his face. She had never seen him cry. Had never heard such sounds. Now she reached out to him and held him, and he wept a long hard time. She wept, too, for his lost innocence, for the years after combat when he just stood and stared. And she wept for herself, for things she had lost that she had not had time to value.
Afterwards, they sat back empty and exhausted, heads hanging like they were sharing the same low-grade fever. She dropped her head against his chest. He stroked her thin, damp arms.
“I will be here for you,” he said. “I will help you get your bearings.”
“I think it will take awhile.”
Then he lifted her face and smiled. “Ana, you remember the last time I held you like this? Your face and arms so wet, I wiped them down with cool, wet cloths. Your body so exhausted, I lifted you and held you. I h
ad watched you for hours, thinking it was you, not Rosie, giving birth.”
She looked up at him, astonished. “I never knew it was you …”
He touched his finger to her lips. “One can know, and not know.”
Exhaustion moved aside then. She felt that thing within her. She saw in his eyes he felt it, too. What they could not speak of, did not want to speak of, would never need to speak of. Finally, he got up from the bed and strapped on his leg brace, then stood and smoothed his pants and seemed his old, assured self again.
He leaned over carefully and kissed her forehead. “Ei nei, the aku are running. Get well soon, so I can take you fishing.”
SOME NIGHTS IN THE SUFFOCATING HEAT, SHE WAS AFRAID TO LIE flat, or to turn on her side, afraid she would pull at the stitches, that they would form keloids, compounding the already awful. In fact, she was afraid to sleep, afraid of the wrench of parting with consciousness. When she dozed off, her dreams had fangs, they hooked into her chest. She slept sitting up facing the fan, wretched and exhausted.
But there were mornings when she was wakened by a skittish breeze and looked up thinking how startling it was to sleep and wake, and be alive all over again. She stood at her window inhaling deeply, watching how dust lay furtive in the fields, turning the light clandestine. How trees and grass hung limp and parched, until the slightest wind brought nature to its feet. Then everything responded. Trees swayed like old showgirls, young green grass exclaimed. Light accumulated in a leaf, and in a bird’s wing. All became spectacle.
Ana thought how she had taken it for granted, the light and the rhythms and the motion. The scents and colors, and proportions. The way shadows made plain things interesting, the way space met in empty corners, creating a place for the eyes to rest. She wanted to dwell on these things again. To slow down and understand their “thingness.” She understood this would take time; there would be periods of backtracking.
Finally the rains came, thrumming on the roof, on broad banana leaves like huge hands slapping pelts. Ana turned carefully on her side, finding great comfort in the sound. It rained all night, deep as canoes, so the world lay still and listened. In time, her body’s internal music and the rain found their right rhythms, and seemed to drum out Ana’s individual song, recalling her geneaology, each footprint of her forebears, her name, and the name of each of her organs, her prehistory and her future. A song of rebirth, that went on and on.
House of Many Gods Page 17