House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  They had not always eaten well. There had been small-kid years of surplus cheese and food stamps. Years when the rice bag was only one knuckle full, when Ben bartered his whale-tooth toast rack and old canoe paddles for fresh meat. She remembered Aunty Pua carefully lifting meat from her plate and giving it to Ana. Later she saw the woman in the kitchen, licking juices from the empty plate. She remembered quiet Aunty Ginger going forth to borrow fire, weaving through fields with a neighbor’s torch when there was no money for electric bills, when they couldn’t even afford matches. And she remembered Noah giving her a quarter for shave-ice while he rolled “cigarettes” of mango leaves.

  She remembered that their lives had changed when her mother started writing letters home. Over twenty years of letters, inside of which were folded checks that had bought milk and protein, school clothes, sturdy shoes. Everyone had known but Ana, who never picked her eyes up from her books. Hungry or not, they had loved her unconditionally, had fed and even spoiled her. So how, she wondered, had the family betrayed her? How had they lied to her? What exactly was betrayal? And how did one define a lie?

  One thing she had learned in medicine: after a major illness, patients were never the same. The best of them were humble, cherishing each breath. The word mortality entered their syntax. Ana touched her chest, wondering what her illness had taught her. Maybe cancer was the cure. The thing that struck her down, shook her like a rag, shocked her into letting go, letting it all go. Perhaps that’s what cancer did: gave people permission to stop keeping track.

  After a while she moved through the house and out to the lānai. She stepped down to the yard and stood before the clothesline. She stared at it a long, hard time, and at the end poles shining in moonlight. Then she went back into the house and pulled the big sheet from her bed. She pulled the curtains from the windows. In the dining room she pulled the tablecloth from the table, and pulled down those curtains, too. She went to Noah’s room where he sat sleepless at his window, a towel wrapped round his head like a swami.

  “Uncle. What’s wrong with your head?”

  He tapped the towel. “Had one good dream. Like keep it warm, maybe it come back again.”

  She pulled the big sheet from his bed, then closed the bathroom door and filled the tub. She picked up a bar of soap and a scrub board and knelt beside the tub, and scrubbed each sheet and curtain and the tablecloth. Sometimes she paused, imagining them clean and billowing. She scrubbed for hours until the flesh of her palms were wrinkled like cone sushi.

  She scrubbed till dawn, then laboriously wrung each thing out. She filled the tub again and slowly rinsed them, wringing and rinsing until she was exhausted. She leaned against the tub and dozed. Then a final rinse before she placed them like great, twisted loaves into a basket, and dragged it to the yard.

  Sun coming up, she stood with clothes pins in her mouth, snapping the sheets to spread them evenly, watching them billow out like spinnakers. She snapped and shook and spread each thing, hanging it carefully, meticulously, until they took up all of two clotheslines.

  One by one, the family woke and stood stretching at their windows. Seeing her, they paused. Rosie stepped out onto the lānai, watching Ana move up and down the line, straightening the sheets as they surged and bellied out. Then she leaned her weight against a pole, shoving it deeper into the ground so that the sagging line pulled taut. Almost cautiously, Rosie stepped down to the yard. Ana turned and put her arm round her cousin’s waist.

  “I never would have dreamed it,” Rosie said.

  Big Ben looked out the kitchen window, then called back to Tito. “Ey! Try look! First time dat girl evah hang laundry in her life. First time she evah go near dat clothesline.”

  She and Rosie stood arm in arm, shouting as sheets ballooned into flying tunnels.

  THEY WERE A CARAVAN, HEADING TO THE AIRPORT. TWO CARS, three trucks, even Uncle Noah. At the terminal, the men checked her baggage and shuffled back and forth, doing male things so as not to show emotion. Through security, then she stood at the boarding gate, half-buried in fragrant lei, looking beautiful and wrecked as they embraced her.

  Finally, she put her lips to Rosie’s ear. “Take care of her for me.”

  Then the family moved aside. There was only Ana. She stood very still, not knowing what to do, and stared at this woman who had given herself a second chance. Re-created herself. A woman always in transition. Ana saw the power that independence gave her, the sense of being accountable only to herself.

  Still, she wanted to ask why. I know you loved me. But you loved you more. Tell me why it still seems wrong. Why it seems unnatural.

  Her mother was talking now, her voice soft. “… have it in you to change people’s lives … very, very proud of you.”

  Ana just stood there.

  “Remember, it’s only a five-hour flight to San Francisco. Should you ever want to visit …”

  She stepped forward, drawing Ana close. “I hope you find love … I hope you let love in. Live, Ana. Live!”

  She watched her mother move into the passageway, legs slim and gleaming like a colt. She watched her turn and wave, a woman stepping from a frame.

  ‘OHANA O KAUMAHA

  Family of Sorrow

  MONTHS PASSED. DAYS SEEMED BLEACHED A PROTOPLASMIC GRAY, nights mere hours of lidded peace. Only the patients before her were real—the bleeding ulcer, the fibrillating heart. One night at the EMS loading dock, she delivered a premature baby, a tiny, wrinkled thing like a small balloon deflated. It lay silent, still as death, then opened its eyes and screamed. It waved its arms in ecstatic little circles. It was not her first delivery, but in that moment Ana felt an almost unbearable intensification of her senses, a connection to this brand-new life. She leaned down and kissed the newborn, then kissed the paramedic.

  Days later, the medical director of the ER called her in. When he asked how she was feeling she said she was having second thoughts about ER.

  “That is … I’ve been thinking of switching to OB-GYN. It’s not as crucial as breaking open someone’s chest and clamping their heart back together, but since my surgery I think I want a branch of medicine that deals in birth, beginnings, that sort of thing.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “At the risk of sounding sexist, ER is no place for a female. Even orderlies are burned out in two years.”

  He paused, and looked down at his desk. “Ana, when you first arrived you were a ball of fire. We had pegged you for a future chief resident. But, with your surgery and follow-up treatments, you’ve missed important lectures, unit rotations. I want to make a recommendation …”

  She leaned forward earnestly.

  “… that you repeat this year of residency. You should have top evaluations and skills when you complete this program. Right now evaluations only place you in the upper half of your year. I want you to establish that level of excellence again.”

  “I think I’ve been expecting this.”

  “And you might just want to do general practice for a while. Instead of jumping into three more years of grinding out a specialty.”

  “You don’t think I’d make a good OB-GYN?”

  “I think you’d be brilliant at it. It’s just you’ve been through a lot. You should think hard about how much stress you want in the next five years.”

  “Well … what’s life without stress.”

  “It’s longer.”

  SHE SAT AT THE HUMU HUMU LOUNGE WITH GENA MELE. “HE made me feel like a terminal case in brief remission.”

  “Ana, he’s giving you a second chance. You bear down next year, you could call your own shots.”

  She sipped her beer, fighting mild depression. “My God, will this training never end?”

  “Remember, we volunteered for this. Nobody drafted us.”

  A year earlier, Gena had passed her bar exams and joined Lopaka’s small firm out on the coast. Though she was hired as his associate, he kept her in the background, researching briefs and doing paperwork.

  “I�
��m smart. I’m aggressive. He feels threatened and treats me like an intern.”

  “Then quit. Fight back. Why be his lackey?”

  Gena smiled. “If he asked me to clean his john, I would. Something in me wants to give that man everything I’ve got.”

  Ana put her glass down. “I can’t bear to hear this. Women like us are supposed to be breaking the mold, not kowtowing to the old ways.”

  “Well, wait till you fall in love. Logic goes out the window.”

  One night Ana had pulled up to his office unannounced. The lights were dim when she entered, calling his name. They didn’t hear her, but she saw them through a door in the records room. Near-naked, on a makeshift couch. Lopaka down on his knees like he was waxing Gena’s floors, sobbing and thrusting inside her, shouting magnificent things, that he was hers, hers unconditionally. Ana had stood there paralyzed, watching Gena’s legs flailing round his shoulders, watching him wait until she came before he allowed himself to come. Then he collapsed as if she had reached inside and wrung his heart. They never heard Ana leave. Now she stared at the girl, clinical and detached.

  “That catchall word again. Do you know that hearing the word ‘love’ can actually slow a patient’s bleeding? It constricts blood vessels. In operating theaters in the war, when morphine was short, it proved to be an anesthetic.”

  Gena studied her. “Is that all you think of when you think of love?”

  “I think it’s the oldest delusion in the world. Folks use it to free themselves from common sense.”

  “Ana, sometimes you make me feel real sad. You seem determined to go through life without experiencing certain human emotions.”

  She toyed with beads of condensation on her glass. “Well, now, maybe that’s the point. Maybe what counts at the end of a life is not who loved us, or who we loved. But who did not love us … and who we did not love.”

  “You mean how someone without it learns to cope? How not being loved builds character?”

  Ana hesitated, feeling the conversation had swerved, that somehow they were discussing her.

  In the silence Gena asked, “What about children? That kind of love.”

  “I’m happy to deliver them, but I don’t feel that mythical imperative to ‘give birth.’ I believe there are women with not much need for men, or kids. The type driven to, oh … erase boundaries, strain the limits. Renegades with a certain hungriness of spirit.”

  Gena laughed. “Well, I’m afraid my ‘hungriness of spirit’ has been hijacked. I’m just a uterus in love.”

  Something in Ana turned, she spoke with vicious intonation. “It’s not just your spirit, Gena. Every time you use that word, you sound brain-damaged. Your horizons have definitely sunk down to your genitals.”

  She sat very still, then unsteadily rose to her feet. “You know, Ana, you were always too critical, always …”

  “Polymorphously insensitive?”

  “… something of a bitch. Your sickness didn’t change that. You should know that I pray for you, for your complete recovery. But right now I need to get away from you. Good night.”

  Alone, Ana stared at the choirlike arrangement of liquor bottles behind the bar. They gleamed, as if about to burst into hymns.

  SOME DAYS SHE SAT LIKE AN OLD LADY ON THE EDGE OF HER BED, studying a calendar. The weeks, the months that would add up to a year. And then another. Her phone rang. She stared at it until it stopped. She looked in the mirror, amazed to find a face there. Amazed when she felt hunger, thirst. In bed her fingers gently walked her scars. It was the absence that always took her by surprise. The surgeon had suggested leaving a “skin flap” in case Ana wanted a breast implant in the future.

  She declined. “No leftovers. Please. Just a nice, neat scar.”

  In fact, there were two scars, each five inches long. Rather like an upside-down T-bar on a slant leaning toward her underarm where they had removed certain lymph nodes to be sure. Stitch marks made the scars appear as luminous white railroad tracks that intersected. The tautness of stretched silk, no surface feeling when she touched them. And there was still discomfort, a vague pain deep within where tissues had been cauterized.

  She watched her hair grow into a wavy crew cut which she nervously coasted her hands through before each checkup with her surgeon. Each time she tested negative she experienced exhaustion, a downsurge of adrenaline, and then guilt, because surviving had somehow put her on a lower plane. Lower than that of women who had died. She was learning that the truth of cancer was never told by the living. The truth was what was finally apprehended by those who did not beat it.

  WHEN SHE MENTIONED THE INCIDENT WITH GENA, ROSIE SIGHED. “Try to be kinder. That girl lost a baby couple months ago. She keeps it from Lopaka.”

  “Why didn’t someone tell me?”

  “Oh, Ana. Look what you’ve been through. But, maybe you should drive out soon. ‘Park boys’ beating up soldiers. Another killing over drugs. Lopaka’s got his hands full. And Makali‘i—that girl’s suddenly got eyes for older boys.”

  She promised to visit, then put it off, exhausted by a double workload. Then she read of more arrests in Nanakuli. More drug busts. She thought of oxidizing Quonset huts deep in the valley where no one dared to venture. Huts where drugs were bought and sold, where gangs kept their arsenal of guns, and where they took their girls. Thinking of Makali‘i, Ana called Rosie and drove out for the weekend.

  No high-rise buildings, she often forgot how on the coast the sky was everywhere, sunlight so blinding folks could not think. They just lived stunned. She saw children leaping in the sea that paralleled the highway, their skin so coppery and shimmering they seemed to be covered with mirrors. She felt herself unwind, reentering a world that required no effort of her. Yet, it required everything.

  She passed big, husky road workers wearing yellow hard hats, sweat pasting their shirts to their massive dark backs. She thought how beautiful Hawaiians were, then almost hit the brakes in shock. It had been a long time since she looked at men sexually, studying the shape of their bodies, reflecting on how they each smelled differently yet the same, with the same underlying odor of maleness. She had almost forgotten the warmth and roughness of male skin, the texture and density of male hair. Yet the idea of making love, of baring her chest to a man, appalled her. She did not want that intimacy in her life again.

  As she turned up Keola Road, the house, her touchstone, came out to meet her. In broad daylight all the lamps lit, every room aglow. Noah blasting Louis Armstrong across the fields, so the house seemed a big, pulsing jukebox. Sitting with Rosie, Ana realized how much she had missed in the past few years. How little attention she had paid. An aunt had died. Two cousins had married and moved to the mainland. Another cousin in prison.

  “Changes not just in our family,” Rosie said. “But up and down the road. Panama Chang married an Italian girl. Now only three nights a week are rice nights, other nights she cooks him pasta. Ho! the fights. He throws her pasta to the chickens.”

  “Where did he find an Italian girl?”

  “Ana. Pick up your eyes. We got all kinds here, always did have. Look at your father, the handsome cop—Hawaiian/Chinese/haole.”

  Rather dreamily, Ana recalled her first love, Tommy Two-Gods. “His father was Jewish, from New Jersey. His mother, Catholic, a local Hawaiian-Japanese girl. He wore a Star of David and a Christian cross.”

  “He’s back, you know, in Nanakuli.”

  In the silence, the falsetto plaint of a mosquito.

  “Been halfway round the world,” Rosie said. “Places like Libya. Beirut. I don’t know why, but that boy came home a radical.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Said he hated the military, saw too much what he called ‘racism.’ Against him as a mix-blood, and a Jew. When he heard you were a doctor he was proud, said you were always two steps ahead of him.”

  She swallowed twice before she asked, “Did you tell him about … my surgery?”

  “No, Ana. That’s f
or you to tell. Now he’s hooked up with that group Mālama Mākua, trying to force the military to stop bombing up the coast. He’s working with Lopaka.”

  She thought of his eyelashes, long as a mule’s, while Rosie chattered on.

  “Everybody talking bombs, radiation. Nobody paying attention to our kids. They’re not dying from bombs. But from drugs and bullets. Too many gangs rumbling out here, even in the schools.”

  Ana came alert now. “How is Makali‘i?”

  “Never home. I feel like I’m losing her.”

  In those moments, Ana saw how her cousin had aged somewhat. Now midthirties, she was still unmarried, still devoting herself to holding the family together, keeping peace between elders and their kids. She had become the vessel of wisdom and patience in the family, the one who dispensed forgiveness and love. Tall and husky as a man, Rosie’s face was still beautiful, and when she entered a room folks felt an immense and sudden calm that seemed to shelter them. But something had faded from her eyes. The gleam of youth, expectation.

  Ana, put her arms around her. “Tell me, cousin. How are you?”

  “Oh, a little lonely. No time to meet a good, serious man.”

  “Now, listen to me, Rosie. Bye and bye, you’re going to meet someone. You’re going to be happy.”

  “Oh, Ana. Do you think so?”

  She paused, then granted her cousin the precious amnesty of lies.

  “Of course. I have seen this in my dreams.”

  In the yard a peacock spread its brilliant tail. Ana yawned and stretched out on a mat, feeling a yogic completeness. When she woke, shadows were long, rectangles of light on linoleum lengthening perceptibly, measuring out the afternoon. Doves warbling in guava trees. The piping voices of children playing in the yard. Pau hana folks shooting the breeze as they walked up the road. All sounds that spoke with sweet recall of childhood.