SHE HAS BEEN IN HONOLULU SEVERAL WEEKS. NOW SHE SITS IN ‘A‘ala Park, just west of downtown Honolulu.
“You see, Lili, in our islands, trees are filled with Pidgin-speaking birds. We call them mynahs.”
She listens with the stillness of the blind. Even folks who speak English here speak with a soft, quick Pidgin mouth. It is so comforting, she smiles, then squints against the red-hot shock of flowers.
“This is torch ginger, Lili. And this, hibiscus.”
Seventeen years. She feels in her body’s slightest adumbrations, its slimmest quakings, a lying back, melting recognition.
She looks down at her hands. They used to carry books, and touch the shoulders of young men. She knows they are her hands because they’re attached to the ends of her arms. But she suddenly knows nothing about them, what they’ve done, what they’ve touched. She can’t understand how they’ve grown so veined and liverish, how life has wrecked them so. For a minute she’s amnesiac, marooned. Then she touches her cane, sees on her feet ugly orthopedic shoes, sees how folks look at her. She remembers who she is, and what she is.
She lifts her head, smells the air, explaining to her sister, “That is smoke of hulihuli chicken from a barbecue stand. And there, brooding in the heights, are the majestic Ko‘olaus.”
And just behind her, behind Iwilei, is the sea, a view beautiful to the verge of tears. Here is a place where, if one were ready, life could come clean. All around are promises, consolation. Children kneeling, laughing, playing ini quatro. Flower women stringing leis. Delicate old Chinese and Japanese ladies sitting in warm sororities of chatter. Husky, dark construction men with metal hats eating bento lunches, white tusks jutting out from their lips in laughter.
“And, Lili, do you hear women talking in Hawai‘ian Mother Tongue? The language I thought in, and slept in as a child, the tongue of half my genealogy.”
Now, trying to remember, she has to search for ordinary words. Grandmother . . . tt. Mother . . . makuahine. Teacher . . . she cannot remember. Talking with her sister makes her think of family she no longer has. Sometimes at night she stands outside her father’s house up in Alewa Heights.
“Mama. I am tired. Papa. Now I understand. Let me sit and talk with you. O, take me in.”
She sees them through the windows, orphaned by their children. She sees how gently her father touches her mother. How tenderly he combs her hair. Grief has made him human. Like her, they have grown frail and old. Seeing her would strike them dead.
ONE DAY NEAR DOWNTOWN HONOLULU SHE SEES FOLKS PARADING, a kind of demonstration. She moves closer. Hundreds are marching and shouting. She does not see their banners: STATEHOOD FOR HAWAI‘I. Fear, instinct, go beyond logic. She imagines these crowds marching to throw her out of Honolulu. To keep her out. They know what she is, what she has been. Know her unspeakable, foul, and filthy past.
Soon police will come and shackle her. She stands rooted to the spot. Then, terrified, she turns away before they can catch her, whacking leaves and bushes with her cane, limping so fast, she stumbles. A woman broken into many women. After a while she slows down, breathless. No one has followed her. She leans against a doorway, wiping her face with a handkerchief, wiping perspiration from the knob of her cane.
Looking up, she sees, but does not see, a poster on a wall. She wipes her face again. Then it seems the poster looks at her, it draws her eyes. Sweat streams from his cheeks down the sides of his neck. A spotlight doubles the depth of the surface of his mahogany skin, so that his face, his hands, even his shining trumpet leap at her. She reaches out, touching the face. Her hand seems to pass through his face and through the poster, through the doorway and the wall, stretching back and back into the vapors of the past.
“Keo.”
His name moves softly through her, reminding her of innocence, ordinary riches. Life still unprobed, unknown.
She studies the poster again. The shape of the body, the bend of dark arms. A memory of nights when he sat in a canoe, blasting his trumpet at the sea like a madman, not knowing she watched him. She leans her head against the wall, remembering a sea flight of dolphins rising and rising, bodies shimmering with salty jewels. Keo standing and playing for them. The blistering sound of longing. She remembers the dolphins attentive as humans uplifted by his horn.
FOR WEEKS SHE PASSES BACK AND FORTH ACROSS THE STREET. She watches humans exit and enter, hearing their laughter. It has been so many years, she wonders what it is like to laugh out loud. How does one stop? One night she enters the Swing Club when it is very late and crowded. Braving the sargasso of bodies, she finds a place against the wall.
Glancing at her, half amused, folks see an old woman in cardigan and leather tie-shoes. Someone of pedantic cleanliness. Gray hair cut in a short pageboy, eyes bespectacled, pupils magnified. Perhaps a once-lovely face—impeccable shape of chin and cheekbones—now ravaged by wrinkles, scars, exploded veins. Lips set in a sideways smile of paralytic contour.
In the dimness, a waiter offers a chair. She shakes her head, wanting to be a featureless, standing shape. At first she is numbed by the onslaught to her senses—distillate of rum, tobacco, tropical colognes. The caustic sweat of humans, the crowd’s feverish anticipation. But she has learned to shut everything out, to be invisible and observe.
She does not faint when he appears. Her breathing does not change. And when he starts to play she is not nauseous with remembering. She shuts her eyes, flipping backward through the years. Life stacked before her as a folio. She does not grieve. She merely looks with wonder. She goes away and comes another night, returning and returning, always very late. And always she stands against the wall.
Sometimes she does not come for weeks. Sometimes Keo changes clubs. But Honolulu is a small town, and always she finds him. Some nights when he soloes, kicking off his shoes, he stands at the edge of a stage leaning into the audience, discerning shapes of heads at the back of the room. Occasionally in the dark, their eyes meet but never seize. His glance passes, his horn blazes on, adding little styptic touches when the group joins in, threatening to overdo things, go commercial or sentimental. From their names, she knows the drum man is Filipino, bass and piano men Hawai‘ian-Portuguese. The strange-hued relief saxophonist is, by his name, Arito, Japanese.
Listening, she still hears that sorrowing in Keo, always threatening to engulf him, a fiery grieving from his horn. Some nights his blowing is the execution of secret demons, each one of whom is valiantly resisting. He charms them, disembowels them, or lulls them into acquiescent ballads. His body folding round his horn, boneless as a glove.
She sees he’s still dapper and fit, but somewhere he has been used up. She hears in his music that he has peaked. Yet he is still possessed of excellence, for when he plays, he imitates no one, no one else’s sound.
Sometimes she wants to shout, “Slow down. Slow down.”
She remembers a man named Dew Baptiste, remembers how he once explained jazz. It was not calligraphy, the essence of which was speed. Jazz was about loitering. It was about soloing and journeying and coming home, embracing echoes of other horns and drums and strings and keys, so that audiences had the impression of being inside a great timepiece swung on a chain across the monumental girth of some dark god, and inside that timepiece were wheels that ratcheted and shrieked and purred at different rates though they were all related, all working to a common purpose, to touch the core of a human soul.
Sometimes she feels a resurrection, feels heard by Keo’s trumpet, as though it understands and sings out all she cannot tell. If she remains, if she stays in this town long enough, maybe it will sing out everything. She will be purged, she will forget. But scars have an ingenuity all their own. When she looks round the city, she sees crowds of tourists, military. There are still too many men. Which always starts the humming in her spine, the little skulls biting down. For a while she avoids the jazz clubs, retreats to her bleak hotel room, wondering why she remains. There is nothing for her here. Nothing for her anywh
ere. Who she was is dead.
She begins to feel stalked, feels something shambling after her. A slow invisible thing that, once let loose, will have its way. She becomes breathless. Something swallows her oxygen, her every gasp, something gnaws her throbbing cells. She rakes her nails down skinny arms, whispers to her sister.
“Lili, I’m afraid.”
Each morning, she looks at the depression in her pillow to see if it has filled with brains. She waits for Satan, for his footstep. For surely he is in this town.
She will leave this place. Each lane, each street reminds her of what she was, what she lost. What clearly happened to her. Whatever called her back is not strong enough to hold her. She packs her solitary suitcase, goes to hear Keo one last time. In a future stained with fevers, medications, he will be her balm, her indoor sea.
That night his playing is off. His lip is festering, he broods in the shadows. Perhaps it’s the crowd, the smoke, the lighting, that turns her attention to the relief man on saxophone. His performance is usually mediocre. When he stands to play, Sunny always concentrates on his fingers on the keys, the blue bluntness of their tips. She has never quite discerned his features. Light bouncing off his jacaranda skin always leaves a glare, blurring his face.
But now, as he segues into “I Wished on the Moon,” head bouncing up and down, the spotlight catches in his ear, locked in a blue puzzle of cartilage. He turns in profile. She moves closer to the stage. A nerve vibrates at the juncture of his neck and jaw, with the flapping motion of a frog’s gullet. A nerve that pulsed before her eye all the months of red-clay nights he forced himself inside her. Riding her, and riding her. She turns, stumbles outside. She bends and vomits on her cane.
She moves down dehydrated streets, all her little skulls a-chatter, making her spinal cord snap and curl. In the glow of jade hare walls, she sits shuddering so violently her chair advances across the room. She wads tissue in her mouth, so chattering teeth won’t break in bits. She buries her face and screams. After a time, she lifts her head and smooths her hair. She straightens her dress and cardigan. She reaches for her suitcase and slowly, meticulously, unpacks.
KA ‘UMEKE K ‘EO
The Gourd Is Full, and So the Mind
IN HER SMALL SHOP OFF MERCHANT STREET, MALIA FITTED A dress on a middle-aged redhead wearing emeralds. Fifteen years ago, she had changed this woman’s sheets at the Moana Hotel.
I cut Schiaparelli labels from your dresses. I stole your Guerlain perfume.
The woman studied her reflection in a mirror, then smiled with equine teeth and wrote a check, complimenting Malia on her shop.
Alone, Malia sat at her Singer, furious, whipping the motor into a frenzy so the needle snapped, chewing up good linen. Different hairdo, a few pounds less, but Malia looked exactly as she had fifteen years earlier.
She didn’t recognize me. Because I’m not in uniform! Doesn’t know she wears dresses made by hands that scrubbed her toilet.
Eventually she calmed down, soothed by the knowledge that within each hem, each dart, each shoulder pad of the woman’s dress—of every dress she sewed for tourists—were scribbled curses, little war cries. “E Poko ke Ola.” May your life be short. “Ho‘op ka ‘Amo.” May your anus snort and sputter. “E Hele ‘Eku ‘Eku.” Go and root as a pig.
They had appeared like little phantoms. One day the Singer took off on its own, the needle stitching madly while she watched. Malia had jumped back, the machine suddenly so hot it smoked. Its black enameled body gleamed. She thought of Pono, whose fingerprints still roamed the Singer, whose perspiration oiled its joints and screws. She felt her presence in the jerky dance of thread spools, the needle spitting oaths from Pono’s brain.
Through the years, Malia’s designs had become remarkable, clothes upon which folks remarked. She drew patterns with calligraphic speed, cut without measuring, sewed without basting. Her signature welted seams gave clothes a richer look. She perfected the cabana set, matching bathing trunks and shirts for men. Headscarves converting to halter tops for women. She created the pocket bra for falsies. Pocket panties for sachets. But she preferred dresses, jackets, anything with darts and hems where little curses were inscribed.
One night Malia sat cutting up old kimonos for cummerbunds and vests. Her scissors rasped and snipped, and something tapped her rib cage. Something caught her eye. A design in an antique kimono hanging in the window, an embroidered figure—an old woman with a cane. The eyes seemed to step out at her, the face gripped her, eerily familiar. She stood, stroking the kimono, trying to remember where it came from, and why the figure haunted her.
She turned up the radio, hearing the broadcast from the Reef Hotel. Johnny Almeida, blind mandolinist, singing “Pua Sadinia.” Gardenia flower. Then Lena Machado, that old Hawai‘ian songbird. Malia shook her head, wishing Keo would see how jazz was dying in the islands, something called rock and roll was moving in. She wanted to tell him that maybe it was time to turn around, come back, play music of his people.
She saw how his face softened when he heard ancient, haunting chants accompanied by gourds and clack-sticks. Or even when he heard folk music of ‘ukulele, slack-key guitar. But each time she discussed it with him, she understood jazz was for him like breathing. To give it up would be to die.
“It would be,” he said, “like burying the memory of Sunny Sung.”
Hearing that, Malia almost slapped him.
“You know, for years I thought of you as a pure artist, not much caring for the things of the world. Now I see you don’t much care for people either.”
Keo looked at her, shocked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re selfish. You dream of finding Sunny because you need her in order to be happy. It’s still about you. What about Mama and Papa? What about DeSoto? He’s got a wife and kids now. You never ask about them. Never lift your head and look around.”
“That’s not true,” Keo argued. “I love all of you. I worry about you plenty.”
Her words were venomed. “No. You worry about you. You drag your grief round like a sickness, letting it bleed from your horn. We all suffered in the war. Everyone has scars.”
That night he studied his parents. “Mama? Papa? You OK?”
Timoteo nodded. “Yeah, son. Everyt’ing pretty good. How’s about you?”
Leilani sighed. “He need find one wife. Been too long alone.”
“Brother misses Sunny Sung. You folks know that.” Feeling guilty, Malia continued, “You know, today I thought of Pono. She’s got mana plua, double mana. Folks say she’s part kahuna. Keo, maybe she could tell you what happened to Sunny.”
Leilani shook her head. “Maybe she look him to death, dat’s what. No fool round wit’ dis wahine.”
Next day, Malia walked through fields and lanes to Pono’s, and discovered she was gone. Neighbors said there had been tragedy. All four daughters had deserted her, running off with strangers. She had moved to the Big Island where the ma‘i pk man, father of those girls, had left her a broken-down coffee plantation.
SHE TOOK A STEAMER TO THE BIG ISLAND, AND BEFORE THEY sighted land, her nostrils burned with vog—volcanic ash and fog. This was the island of seething volcanoes, of moody Pele, volcano goddess, whose boiling exhalations consumed forests, entire villages. Malia traveled up into misty mountains through little coffee-smelling towns—Holualoa, Kainali‘u, Kealakekua—surrounded by miles of lush coffee-cherry trees. In the town of Captain Cook she asked for the woman named Pono. Folks stepped back, then pointed down Napo‘opo‘o Road, leading to a hidden driveway, a big white haunted-looking house.
She stood on the lawn, feeling the house look back at her. A peacock spread its shimmering tail and sobbed. Then a little bandy-legged woman with snaggled teeth came out onto the lnai. “Yeah. Whatchoo want?”
She hesitated. “Do you know the woman named . . . Pono?”
She bent over laughing. “Oooh, funny dat. I stand all day in kitchen, cleaning pilau fish fo’ her. Scraping bloody pig che
eks. Cooking, scrubbing just fo’ her. Why? She save my life. Pono like my tita.” She looked Malia up and down. “My name Run Run. What you want wit’ Pono?”
“It’s . . . personal.”
She put her hands on her hips, squinting like a sharpshooter. “Well, I da ‘personnel directah’ here. You got message? I da message-man!”
“My name is Malia Meahuna. Pono taught me how to sew. . . .”
Run Run studied her, then pointed to the front steps. “Sit. Wait.”
Malia sat on steps so worn they were scalloped and toe-printed. She seemed to doze. Then she felt all the air of the fields sucked onto that porch behind her. She felt wind on her shoulders like hot hands. She was afraid to turn, knowing that tree of a woman stood there smelling of eucalyptus, earth, and ocean. She heard Pono magisterially lower herself into a great, deep chair. She heard her sigh.
When Malia finally turned, she saw the familiar perfect face, golden-skinned and full-lipped, hair slick as lava braided down her back. She had changed somewhat. Black, slanted eyes now seemed to hold more pain and more intelligence than one human should possess. Yet she was still beautiful in the voluptuous, exhausted way of women who have done everything to survive.
The slight suggestion of a smile. “How are you, Malia? Do you still have airs?”
She laughed softly. “Yes. I’m still guilty of daring beyond my means.”
“One must dare. Or live in imitation. And, you are well?”
“Very well. Designing clothes, and prospering.”
She climbed the steps, presenting Pono with a soft, square package, wrapped in delicate rice paper, within which was an old and beautiful kimono.
“This comes with much aloha. I have often thought of you.”
“And your child? How is she?”
“. . . Baby Jonah. She’s beautiful. Twelve years old now.”
Pono gazed into the distance. “The father has become a lawyer. He knows the child is his. Their features are identical.”
Song of the Exile Page 27