Songs slowed, Kiko Shirashi turned to study Malia, smiling approvingly. Malia had lost her chubbiness, so her Polynesian bones stepped forth. She would never be a great beauty, but she was extremely handsome. Kiko had always felt compassion for the young woman, thought she might like to help her, but Malia did not encourage help. Her self-conscious speech and manners led her away to dark corners, made her seem quirky rather than refined. It filled Kiko with inquietude, yet the girl’s only sin was trying to improve herself, her aspirations lavish.
The first time they met, Malia was wearing a secondhand dress, probably from a hotel guest. It was faded but expensive, with set-in shoulders, exquisite seams. Visiting Shirashi Funeral Home, she was also wearing toe-pinch high heels, much too small, surely Goodwill. Attempting an elegant stride, she had skidded across varnished floors, making sounds like the screech of coffin screws. Kiko had felt sorry for her, fearing her ambitions and natural attributes would never jell.
But now Malia seemed more polished. She had abandoned the quick electric flirtation of gestures, no longer nervously striking a pose. She had traded outlandish hats for snoods and upswept hairdos. Her dresses were simpler, wide-shouldered, and seemed to fit the shape of her still-voluptuous body.
“With the Moana closed,” Malia confided, “no more hand-me-downs. I make my own dresses now.”
There was something relaxed about her, maybe it was fatigue, the war pressing everything close so there was no room for extras. Still, there was a desperation in the eyes, as if something’s claws were sunk in her back. Kiko had heard rumors—Leilani’s new “hnai” daughter, the lovely child now petaling round their ankles.
“So, now you have a little sister,” Kiko said, stroking the head of the child.
“. . . Yes.”
Kiko turned, and took her hand. “You look wonderful, Malia. A little slimmer?”
She smiled. “Food rationing. And sadness does things, doesn’t it? Poor Mama, all three sons gone.” Her hands flew to her face. “Oh. Kiko. I’m sorry. How is your husband? Can he write you?”
She nodded sadly. “But, his dignity—he won’t let me join him. He’s now at Tule Lake Camp in California.”
She spoke in a well-meaning, obtuse way, as only the rich and leisured could, so that at first it was hard to feel sympathy.
“. . . twenty thousand American-Japanese interned with him. Some take their own lives out of shame.”
“Sad! So sad.”
Kiko’s shoulders slumped. “No one calls. The grass has grown across my door. I must coif my own hair. Lacquer my own nails. I cannot get appointments. Hard not to feel alone, and shamed. But then, tonight. Your parents. This!”
Her hand flew out, encompassing the music, the neighbors. She tapped Malia’s hand. “Everything you seek is here.”
Malia smiled impatiently. “You’ve traveled, haven’t you?”
“Oh, everywhere. Paris, Athens. Peking. I spent four years in London. Fabulous.”
“But you came home.”
“We all come home. Go out and look around, dear. After that, you’ll understand.”
“What is it I will understand?”
“How we come back to the beginning. For instance, in my youth, for years, I only wore Guerlain, ‘L’Heure Bleu,’ costly French perfume. One day, I was fifty, I picked a ginger blossom. It smelled more costly, more precious than any scent.” She offered the inside of her wrist. “Eau de fresh ginger, straight from my yard.”
Malia bent to her arm, breathing in, already eyeing her father’s yard for blossoms. For months after, she would drag ginger across her arms like yellow emergencies.
That night before she left, Kiko took her aside. “Come visit. We’ll gossip away the hours. And hearing that you sew, I have yards and yards of fabric I would like to give you. Bought in Paris, Rome.”
That night sleep was impossible. She lay awake, taking Kiko’s offer as a sign. The woman would school her, guide her into position for the next phase of her life. She imagined Paris, Rome. Imagined herself poised on great boulevards. Her dress. Her shoes. Her walk. Her talk.
Yet, even then, something mocked her, suspicion that drastic change was not what she was after. That her destiny would always be this island, that it would always be hunger that drove her, not geography.
At 2 A.M. she slipped from her bed, running through fields and lanes to Pono. Malia watched through the window as the woman hunched over, ironing uniforms of a Catholic girl’s school. She was huge and beautiful, tears on her cheeks sizzled in steam. Malia watched her for almost an hour. She watched because she could not look away. Something in this woman called to her. She approached the screen door and tapped lightly, in her hands nine dollar bills.
“Pono! I didn’t forget. Your seven dollars, plus interest.”
She unlatched the screen, perspiring and exhausted. “What you doing out so late? Still ‘Colette-ing’ on Hotel Street?”
“Pau Colette. That life gave me nightmares.”
Pono eyed her skeptically. “So, what you do for work?”
She sighed. “Still hapa-haole hula, part-time selling war bonds, part-time nurse’s aid. Rolling bandages. This, that.” She was impatient. There was something on her mind.
“Still too good for the cannery?” Pono asked. “Well, stick to nursing. Get a certificate. Respect.”
Malia stepped back, appalled. Bagging blood in rubber-soled shoes was not her goal. Neither was tending near-adolescent soldiers. She remembered their eyes, could still feel their dying down in her coils and crucibles.
“Pono. I have an important thing to discuss.” She sat down, folding her hands. “I want to practise on your Singer. Two-three days a week, while you’re at the cannery. In return I’ll watch your girls.”
The woman studied her, suspicious.
“I swear. I want to learn real dress design. Make elegant clothes. You see, I plan to travel.”
“Ho! The war is getting to you. Such ll plans. While boys are coming home in boxes.”
“Listen to me. I’ve got to have a dream for when the war is over. You give me lessons, let me practise on your Singer, I’ll pay you back with yards of rare material—from Paris.”
Pono waved her arm. “You see my life? Wash, iron, cook. Cannery ten-twelve hours so can feed four girls. What am I to do with high-tone fabrics?”
“Make something special. There must be someone you want to be beautiful for? A secret someone? The father of your girls?”
Pono checked herself. Mention of the man she loved seemed so blasphemous, it made her want to strike Malia. Instead she leaned back, thoughtful.
“Maybe. Maybe. Come next week for tryout. Bring material. In return, I show you what I know, secret journeys of the Singer. Ways to twist, and turn, and double-sew while guiding thread in-out the fabric. Ways that make a dress look seamless as a glove.”
It was nearing 4 a.m. when Malia stood, exhausted with their talk, their plans.
Watching her melt into fog, Pono vaguely smiled. In a dream she had seen her own dressmaking fade and vanish. She would move into another, a more urgent life. Her sewing talents would seep into the fluids and flesh of Malia, enriching her. The black-lacquered, prehistoric-looking Singer would become so much a part of Malia’s life, it would become another limb.
Seams would be stitched so fine they’d disappear. Human veins and silken threads would intertwine. Wool tweed turning into hair, linen turning into sun-starched skin. A heart-shaped pincushion would palpitate; Malia would feel the pinch of just-stuck pins. When she pulled thread through a needle, she would feel a humming in her brain.
My legacy to you, Pono thought. For she believed any woman wanting life so much, with all its blows, its quick electrocutions, should be endowed with gifts as well as weapons. Then as she stood ironing, Pono suddenly cried out. A horror reared up through the steam. The face of a young warrior, Malia’s brother, wearing the treadmarks of a Panzer.
SHE WALKED DOWN KING STREET, DISTANT, SERENE. HER
DRESS, her posture, even her gas mask slung across her back looked chic. Her hair upswept with a flower.
“Dorothy Lamour. Hey, Dorothy Lamour!” Servicemen still followed, wanting her, wanting more than what they found in brothels. She threw them dead glances, having left them behind. Kiko Shirashi had opened a door.
Suavely Malia took her place behind the counter at McInerny Department Store, smiling until her eyes took on a deathly gloss. Within weeks she felt herself failing miserably and convulsively. She came to hate the obtuse faces of customers, her cloying compliments.
Standing poised behind a sales counter made her feel like something in a barnyard at a trough, her head bent low, dipping into merchandise repeatedly while customers pointed and grunted and changed their minds. The voices of certain rich women came at her like whining bullets. She answered them in kind, granting them no grace or absolution. In her heart, Malia kept waiting for elegant customers like Kiko, so she could show them she had class. But women like Kiko didn’t shop, maids ran all their errands.
The day she was fired, she sat demoralized at Kiko’s.
“Nothing suits me. I don’t fit in.”
“You have a special nature, Malia.” Kiko patted her hand while they sipped Tom and Jerrys.
In the silence Malia looked round the marble living room. “Your house is so beautiful. Every house on this street is huge. I’ve often wondered what people do in all these rooms.”
“They suffer, dear. Now, let’s look at fabrics.”
Kiko brought out linens from Belgium, damask and silks from France, light tweeds from Italy. Yards upon yards. Malia gasped, studying the threads of the fabrics as if she would find written therein the formula for elegance, irrefutable class. Kiko wrapped them in tissue paper, gave them all to her.
“Make yourself splendid. Make something happen in your life.”
Short of giving her money, she had no idea how else to help Malia. The largest hope she had for her was that a man with taste would find, and marry, her.
Malia took her hand. “I’m going to make you a splendid dress. What do you like, linen? It will be sleeveless, very simple like a sheath. Very elegant.”
Kiko smiled. “Yes, make it simple. I must get used to the unadorned.”
She turned, staring at tall glass-doored teak cabinets, each intricately inlaid with jade and rosewood. There were four, antique and priceless. Each stood absolutely empty. Malia’s eyes followed her gaze.
“They were searching for seditious material,” Kiko whispered. “We were forced to burn everything. Antique fans, scrolls, volumes of poetry. Miniature pastels with kanji lettering.”
Calmly she sipped her Tom and Jerry. “We burned our entire Japanese library. Then the house shrine. Then, my obsan’s kimonos. I was grateful we have no children. They did not see our shame.”
Malia put down her drink and took her in her arms.
“Oh, Kiko. Forgive me. I have been selfish. My problems are so small.”
The older woman wiped her eyes. “Nothing in life is small. It becomes full. It becomes empty. It is never small. But I will tell you this, Malia. Always stay a little selfish. Give everything to others, you become an empty gourd.”
______
ONE DAY A MILITARY CHAPLAIN IN THE LANE, ASKING FOR THE Meahunas. Neighbors pointed the way, then watched, mouths slack, hands diffident behind their backs. He knocked on the door, looking through the screen. Seeing a haole in uniform, Leilani screamed. Refusing to invite him in—who wanted death dripping on their carpet?—Malia kept the screen door between them.
The chaplain spoke, and then again. What he said, what he was telling her, had the slow force of the ocean dragging everything back to its center. He was delivering them back to the center, his voice earnest and gravelly, saying they were bringing Keo home. Malia turned to her parents, unable to speak. She pressed them to the screen door, making him repeat it yet again.
Timoteo’s voice came out dreamy like a child’s, his words stirred by the ceiling fan, echo and echo and echo.
“Keo . . . Keo . . .”
Leilani’s was a vocal soaring, rebirthing of her favorite son. She dragged the chaplain outside where neighbors waited, terrified.
“Tell!” she cried, shaking his arm, then turning to the neighbors. “He coming home! My boy, Keo. True!” She shook his arm again.
The chaplain smiled, nodding toward a military car backed up in the lane, then he patted a document.
“Yes. I’m here to inform his family that, by the grace of God, Keo . . . Mea . . . huna . . . is on a transport ship en route to Honolulu.”
That night rains came, a cleansing eucalyptus smell washed down from the Ko‘olaus. Malia stood outside letting it beat on her eyelids, her breasts and ribs. A stinging, prickly sensation as if she were shedding skin, as if she would slide out slick and new. As if, like a snake, she were tranced.
She spun in circles. “Keo. Keo . . .”
The sky rumbled back old parables. She remembered the chaplain with the news. Remembered his voice, like a boy reciting rhymes. Remembered the military car that brought him, how its bloodred taillights lit up as they pulled away, leaving behind her brother. Giving her back his blood-ripe life.
N PALI O N KO‘OLAU
Cliffs of the Ko‘olau Mountains
THE FEAR OF VISION. SIGHT COULD BE SO DANGEROUS. IT HAD been a long, long sleep wherein he groped for exits, but everything was night, spherical and doorless. He ransacked dreams for keys and clues. Maybe I will wake up in Woosung. Better to remain unconscious.
His ship rounded Ka‘ena Point just after sunrise, O‘ahu still in shadow, but sunlit vessels offshore sparkling like jewels. Keo struggled in his hammock. By then the decks were lined with passengers, some so frail others held them up.
Someone cried, “Honolulu Harbor!”
Half conscious, he pushed his way to a rail and looked out at his island.
The blurred image in his brain, the dream he’d held within him for so long, suddenly came into focus. His sea, his blue-green turf, was there, before him, all around him. Sunrise, wrinkling in the pali of the Ko‘olaus, stained his cheeks. Things rushed at him, geometry of his boyhood, physics of his youth.
. . . The Royal Hawai‘ian Band playing, hula troupes dancing on the dock. Ocean liners pulling into berths beside Aloha Tower. Where is Krash? Where are the boys? Time to dive for tourist coins . . .
People said he called out first, or maybe it was chanting. Then he climbed up on the rail, and dived.
. . . Oiled and naked, shooting the reef in my canoe. Diving deep and deep to coral canyons . . . lagoons of unforgetting. Look, look, a shark tooth. . . . Our ‘aumkua, whose teeth don’t sink in water. Let me sink. Let my hands web, my back scale. Let me settle where my cells remember lime. . . . O let the sea corrode me, scatter me to coral. Let it whisper Mother Tongue to me. . . . Let me be dispersed clicking, clattering, drumming to ancestral rhythms, those old ocean jazz bands. Let me never know again such thirst. . . .
Lifeboats hit the waves, sailors dived in after him. While U.S. carriers saluted ships of liberated prisoners, he entered a naval hospital bound and tranquilized. The problem was, he didn’t want to wake up in Woosung. If it was a dream, he wanted to keep dreaming. Each time he felt his mind reckoning toward consciousness, he thrashed and screamed, fighting it.
One day a nurse shook him impatiently. “Snap out of it. It’s not like you saw real combat.”
He came awake in one blow. Down the ward, gaunt faces, devoid of expression. Some would never make it back. Full awakening came as a series of small torches, intervals between them gradually diminishing, until whole squares of light were formed. Entering life a second time, everything seemed new, an eerie incognito. Looking back, Keo would think how small the cosmos, how paltry and stingy compared to human emotions, the soaring sense he felt seeing his sister, Malia.
He was dozing when she reached his bed. A gutted shell, his skull drawn back, his teeth protruding like a carnivo
re’s. Charcoal blue moons circling his eyes. He woke, felt some subtle change in his surroundings, a new form brush-stroked into the environment. He felt a tugging at his toe. She was tenderly pulling it, an old Hawai‘ian ritual for calling back the dead.
He would always recall her standing there, a quivering kind of poise, reverberant and cool in white. Big-shouldered dress, matching snood, her golden face trembling, trying not to cry. She moved close, took his hand against her heart, then laid her cheek against his cheek. He had even lost his scent. He smelled unknown, a machinery part. But he was there; somewhere under all the layers, he lay brooding. She crawled into bed beside him, sobbing like a calf.
“Brother! Aloha au i‘oe!” I love you.
When he looked up again his mother was rubbing his hands with kukui oil, his father babbling beside her.
“. . . an so we nevah tell you, son, yo’ mama birthed by midwife Victoria Na‘ai, also lady-in-waiting for Queen Lili‘uokalani. Fingahs dat touch royal shoulders, royal hair, also pull yo’ mama to dis world. Give her special mana. She da one chant you home . . .”
He seemed to have walked into the middle of his father’s recitation. Timoteo could not stop.
“. . . and plenny ‘kolehao we make fo’ you . . . one-fingah poi and laulau when you coming home. And real fresh aku. . . . Remembah when I teach you swim? Ho, man! Da nites we near went drown!. . .”
They brought his yearbook from Farrington High. He pointed at snapshots, asking which boys were fighting overseas. Asking how soon he could join them. His mother collapsed. His father led her sobbing from the ward.
Malia looked down like she would suck his eyes out. “You already fought your war. And it’s not over.”
A doctor sat down, trying to explain.
“Starvation turns the body into a cannibal. Refusing to die, it feeds on itself, first fat, then muscle. In final stages, organs. You’re lucky, Keo. Your organs are intact. You’ll build muscle again, and with rest, good food, thiamine shots, you’ll recover almost a hundred percent. There’ll always be recurring fevers from malaria. That never goes away. Vitamins will cure what’s left of beriberi. Yes, it will take time.”
Song of the Exile Page 20