by Mary Wallace
The winding hillside road seemed to call to her, to lure her to slow down to look at the dramatically changing view. She pulled over at a turnout and parked, got out of the car and looked around. She could see down to the sun-besotted beach but her eyes were drawn upward and she gasped at the necklace of clouds that lay in the sky above the rolling green flanks of the mountain. A sign said that the mountain was a volcano, Haleakala. She spoke the name to herself a few times, the lyrical vowels danced on her tongue. A volcano? Better than Midwestern tornados, but not by much if it was ever active.
The hills around her were ranches, farms, and small towns not unlike the sprawling flatland farms she’d driven to in Michigan to pluck fresh grown apples out of trees in the fall. For a city dweller, those annual treks had seemed like walkabouts to an alien planet. You could see the earth, not concrete smothering the land. You could smell the dirt when you walked among the apple trees; it was a primal scent that was at once foreign and comforting. She hadn’t spent much of her life in nature. Comfort came instead from smallness, the repetition of what she knew.
The first house in the upcountry was at a very low rental price and she knew why when the open house sign led to a smaller shed behind a small house. It was an ‘Ohana’, a one bedroom/one bathroom building on the back of the lot. She couldn’t imagine living in someone’s backyard, and Rosalinda would have to sleep on a sofa in the hallway. So she shook her head and wandered back to her car, noticing the eucalyptus and flowering trees that proliferated as she drove up the mountain.
She drove through a quaint little town, Makawao, which looked like a cross between a hippie town and an Old Western town from cowboy movies. She parked and walked onto a rickety old porch and through a tall door into a bakery, breathing in caramel sugar smells.
“What is that?” she asked, staring hungrily at a plate being prepared for another customer, four pastries piled high.
“Long Johns,” the clerk said. “We make them fresh. Long custard doughnuts.”
“I’ll take three,” she said, “1 for here, 2 in a bag to go, please. What kind of juice do you have?”
“Carrot, beet, celery or carrot, orange, ginger. Both with a bit of pineapple and orange.”
“What?”
“Carrot, beet celery or carrot orange ginger.”
“No apple or plain orange?”
“You’re in Hawaii, we have real juice here.” The young man smirked.
“I don’t even know what carrot juice would taste like. I’ll just have water,” she said.
“Sure,” the clerk reached into the glass front cabinet that was steamed up from the fresh warm doughnuts. “You sightseeing?”
“No, looking for a house to rent.”
The clerk straightened up, with a smile on his face. “What are you looking for?”
The bakery felt so warm and inviting, snuggled in between pretty art galleries and small, cozy restaurants. The other customers bantered with each other and smiled at Celeste, then went back to their conversations. She felt safe. And welcome. “Two bedrooms, one bath. A house, hopefully.”
“You looking from online?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he smiled more broadly, “I know a house that’s not listed on the internet.”
“Why isn’t it online?” Celeste asked curiously, suddenly wondering if there were a slew of available houses that she didn’t know about.
“We don’t want lookey-loos. Tourists wander around thinking about moving or having a second place but they never follow through. We want to rent it to someone who will be part of the community.”
Celeste smiled. “My boyfriend is opening a dive shop. And there is a little girl who is looking for a good school. We want to stay.”
The clerk came around the counter, bringing her a plate with her doughnut and a bag with the two others. “Have a seat,” he said, “I’ll bring my Grandma down, it’s her property. It’s got a nice garden. She grew up in the house, bought it from her parents. She rents it out and her tenants just moved out two days ago.”
As Celeste enjoyed the honey custard taste of the Long John, a small, elderly Japanese woman sidled up to the marble top table. Her face was soft and smooth, her hair gray and curly. She sat down on the chair opposite Celeste, her lips parted in a mischievous smile. “My grandson say you have good aura.”
Celeste snickered, putting her hand to her mouth to cover the unexpected sound. “He said what?”
“Your aura. Your life energy.” She pointed her finger around Celeste’s body. “You do, you know. It change from frozen blue to warmer. It try to be orange. You do well to live in upcountry, it ground you, let your aura develop.” She looked closely into Celeste’s eyes, “You been holding your life too tightly. Time for you to trust.”
“My Grandma has a third eye,” the clerk said, as he brought her glass of iced water to the table. He placed a linen napkin underneath it, to absorb the sweat from the cold glass.
Celeste felt comfortable sitting with this elderly lady. She reached out her hand and introduced herself. The lady tenderly took her fingers and shook them, laughing delightedly. “So formal.” She stood up and leaned over the table, “better to hug.” She wrapped her thin arms around Celeste’s neck and squeezed, surprising Celeste with her strength. “Everybody call me Malia.“ She sat down and put her hands flat on the table. “Not for just anybody, my house. For the right people. My last tenant was Korean, not that I mind, I’m Japanese and my husband was Korean, but they buried kim chee around the yard and I don’t know where it is, so my gardener, she careful when she put new flowers in ground.”
“What’s kim chee?”
“Spicy pickled lettuce in clay pot. Bury for weeks to ferment. Hitting one of those with shovel make big mess. It stings the earth, makes it hard for plants to grow. Very vinegary soil. Maybe I put blue hydrangeas in when we hit one of those pots.” She frowned slightly, “You wouldn’t bury pots of kim chee, would you?” She winked.
“I don’t know the first thing about gardening and wouldn’t even know how to work a shovel.” Celeste was embarrassed.
“Ah, City Girl. Where are you from?”
“Michigan. Detroit.”
“Car country.”
“Used to be.”
“Who you going to live with?”
How to label Eddie and his daughter to a potential landlord, she wondered. “With my partner and daughter.”
“You lesbian?”
“No.” Celeste smiled, she hadn’t expected that as a response to her evasion.
“You said partner. I don’t care if you lesbian. I have lesbian niece. No biggie.”
“I just don’t know what to call him.”
“Boyfriend?”
Celeste blushed, “Yes, boyfriend.”
“Want him to be husband? I can feng shui the house, make him propose,” Malia smiled slyly.
“No, no, no,” Celeste protested, putting up her hands. She shook her head nervously, “Can you do that? Do you have the power?”
“I got the power, honey. You tell me when you want me to use it. I get you married in six months.” Her cool, crepe-y hands enveloped Celeste’s. “First we go look at house. We walk, it’s on road behind bakery.”
“You live there?” Celeste wondered if it was another Ohana shed-like building.
“No, I live above bakery. Happy and warm, day and night. My grandson work for me, go to college. He live in another house I own down in Lahaina, easy for him to drive to college. Need to keep him in school so he can get a good job, then he can have his own real estate dynasty like me,” she waved her hand towards the back of the bakery.
Celeste followed her lead, stood up and walked out the door and up a dirt road, Malia giggling at her own audacity.
“Watch out,” Malia said, pushing Celeste back onto the dirt side of the road. “Crazy bikers in little spandex shorts will knock you on your bottom. They speed down from volcano.”
Celeste looked up the road just
as a group of cyclists rounded the corner careening their lightweight bikes towards them. She stepped back with Malia, finding her hand comfortably held in Malia’s cool grip.
“I don’t know what’s worse, worry about dying by bicycle, or having to see mens’ little packages in those spandex shorts,” Malia snorted in laughter, surprising Celeste with her spunk. The old lady tugged her towards a long wall of tightly knit boxwood, eight feet tall, standing stiffly to mark the outside perimeter of the rental property.
It was easy to stop paying attention and be led by the heady scent of roses somewhere nearby. Celeste walked slowly, looking at how dense the boxwood had grown together. It reminded her of the live front fencing of Bloomfield Hills when she walked through to her tennis tournament. To be so close with no reason to rush, she stopped and stooped over to look at the bottom of the boxwood to see how they were planted.
“Why you stop?” Malia said curiously.
“I’ve never seen such dense trees.”
“They are shrubs. My husband trained them into trees.”
“You must have put them in every foot or so to make them so tight.”
“No these very old, they grew together. Every three feet.”
“How old are they? Celeste stood up and touched the twigs and leaves. Compared to the anemic boxwood in front of her Detroit apartment, this was wild and animalistic. Each part of it was alive, holding itself as secure as if it were a wood fence.
“Who knows?” Malia answered.
The smell of roses wafted towards Celeste again and she saw fifteen or twenty feet ahead, a white wooden arbor covered with vining roses. Like the solid wall of living boxwood, the arbor was alive with green leaves, twining thorned stalks and miniature effusively flowering roses. It was a tumult, controlled by the underpinning of a pretty, white, upside down u-shaped structure. A half gate hung open and Malia went through first.
For no reason, Celeste felt her heart soar, as though it, like the miniature roses, could escape the stricture of expectations of her past, of the way things had always been. And before she even saw the adorable cottage, she knew in her soul that she’d never want to live anywhere but here, even if she had to curl up like a snail in a small corner of its land.
“Why you so white?” Malia grabbed her hand. “You feel okay?”
“I’ve never been somewhere like this”, Celeste shook herself a little to try to reorient in the physical world. Her feet were on a brick path that twisted in an S-shape up to the front steps of a cream colored house with a bright red door. There was a jungle of trees, bushes, flowers around it. Lush, but somehow with space in between.
“Island be good for you, you live too much in city.”
“In Detroit, it’s all walls and chain link and cracked concrete.” She put her hand out and gingerly touched different trees and blossoms, half expecting them to shrivel up and disappear, her dreams along with them.
“There’s sickness, you know, when you don’t know nature. You have sickness, I think,” Malia said, nodding at her.
Celeste stood, deep in her own confusion. It felt so lovely, so comforting, like her mother’s huge hug some days when she wasn’t too tired.
Malia walked her over to a circular stand of redwood trees, where a few dead stumps within were used as seats. She lowered her elderly body onto one and craned her neck back to look up to the heights of the trees.
Celeste joined her, amazed at how very tall the trees were. They closed into a small circle that let in a bit of blue sky.
It felt like home.
A home you’ve never lived in, never seen, never been able to imagine but that simply unfolds in front of you, its gentle perfection called into existence by some unformed longing in your soul.
Malia spoke reverentially, “I know,” as though she were reading Celeste’s mind.
After a few minutes of quiet, Malia led her back to the brick walkway, towards the front door. They walked between stands of overgrown rose bushes. “I call it the Rose House,” she said happily.
Celeste froze. She felt her heart beat too hard, one strong beat after another, her breath slowed, her lips went numb.
“What? You see a ghost? No ghost here.”
“You call this house what?” Celeste barely whispered.
“Rose House.” Malia’s wizened face became placid, “What’s little girl’s name?”
“Rosalinda.” Celeste felt like she was on too much painkiller, spaced out of her mind. But she hadn’t taken anything since the flight, when it was her only bridge to her new life.
“Of course.” Malia cocked her head and smiled. “Little girl send you to find house named after her. She like this house too, and your boyfriend,” Malia said the word boyfriend with a happy lilt, “he like it too. Very homey for your family.”
Celeste felt the blood begin to warm in her chest and she followed Malia’s gaze to the center of the path ahead, to the center of the lush property itself.
The cozy cottage sat in the middle of a small forest of trees and bushes. “Banana tree”, the old lady said, “hollyhock, eucalyptus, pine,” she named all the trees that edged the property. “My cabbages,” she said proudly, pointing to a head of cabbage that was as big as a beach ball. “That’s what they used to make the kim chee. Onions, they are as sweet as apples,” she said, motioning to a raised garden bed.
There were so many rose bushes that Celeste couldn’t count them, but their heady perfume wafted around her, mingled with the primal scent of dirt that she remembered from the Michigan apple farms, and the savory smell of what she now knew were onions.
“Foxgloves, daisies, lilies. They all grow in Spring, with the strawberries. You cook?” Celeste could feel Malia watching her, beaming with delight at Celeste’s childlike rapture.
“I do.” Celeste felt a joy that she could not regulate. The land was alive, lush, green, flowering. The trees that surrounded it created a walled Eden, she thought, and the house, her heart leapt when she looked at it more closely. It had elaborate Victorian trim, like the houses on Mackinac Island in the Upper Peninsula where she’d driven every summer to see art shows.
“My grandfather built it. For his mother. It been in my family for 120 years,” Malia said. She pulled on Celeste’s hand, ‘Come inside. I redo kitchen and bathroom. I’m not old lady in my head, just in my body. Very stylish. You like it.”
“I already love it,” Celeste said truthfully. “But I don’t know if I can afford it. It’s too lovely.”
The old lady stopped at the front door. “We see. I have ten houses around island, all rentals. Idiot banks messed me up though, so making payments is most important so I don’t lose another house. Lost one already, dumb bankers. But I have bakery and this house with no mortgage.” She waved her hand, pushing Celeste through the doorway to the pretty hardwood floor entryway. “What can you pay?”
Celeste told her what she had paid in Detroit and what she had seen in Lahaina and, no surprise, the old lady cocked her head seriously. “This much better than those.”
“This is the Taj Mahal compared to that boring cinderblock house down in the flats!” Celeste exclaimed.
“You good lady. House wants you. Trees want you. Wind blew gently when you came. This work out good for both of us. You pay me Lahaina rent. My bank bothering me about a couple of my mortgages around the island, so if you rent and stay a while, I worry less.”
She flipped on a light switch, but she didn’t need to, the windows and skylights brought in enough light.
The house was small, but it shone. Celeste couldn’t tell if it was light bouncing off the white walls but it seemed alive and welcoming.
She put her purse down on the floor by the front door and felt a comforting gravitational pull. How could she walk out of this house, ever? She knew she had to go back to the motel, but all her energy would stay parked here, in this little cottage on this thriving land, waiting until she and Eddie and even Rosalinda could come to live.
Chapter Thir
ty-One
The recession had hit Hawaii, too.
In Detroit, Celeste watched year after year as stores closed. First the specialty places owned by retirees who realized that they were losing their savings by keeping their hobby or decorations store open. Then the clothes and shoe stores, then auto supplies, hardware stores, restaurants and banks. Finally, there was only a big superstore miles away and the downtown was lined with For Lease signs.
Maui was similar, but instead of stores, art galleries were closing. Vacation condos were empty with For Lease signs taped into their windows. There were several storefronts for rent in Lahaina, but the cost per square foot was ridiculously high, landlords had to pay their unmoving mortgages to banks regardless of how much value they’d lost on their property during the prolonged economic contraction.
Eddie asked her to drive them down to Kihei, to a small space in a strip mall that might work for a dive shop, but the building owner wanted 6 months rent up front. She was surprised when Eddie said he’d think about it, because she didn’t know why they would come up with that much cash for a store that could close in 6 months. At least their home rental was a place they’d use every day and she had the money to keep them there for a long time without an income. But she didn’t want to move house money into a storefront, she thought, shaking her head at him when he looked her way.
She could feel his rising anger, but she didn’t know what had triggered it. Each place that they visited still had the bones of the previous closed business, the lost dreams of the shop owners, and she wondered if Eddie was feeling helpless.
He was up at dawn each day, out for a run on the lush hills. She joined him but couldn’t keep up, which was fine because he was short tempered anyway. He insisted that one of them had to stay home with Rosalinda.