18) Take a drink for each male cousin you see cry for the first time:
Kea, who once begged your mom to take him to California with her; who was for so many years your mom’s favorite, even if she never admitted to it; of whom your grandmother made a hānai grandson because Kea’s dad, her neighbor’s son, was a mean alcoholic and Kea’s body proved it. During the viewing, he whispers, “Tūtū, my Tūtū,” as he gazes down at the body. He sobs when they close the casket. He is a pallbearer, one gloved hand lifting the casket, the other wiping his eyes, hidden behind dark glasses.
Your older cousin, Jason, who was the only person you trusted to teach you to ride a bike. You were seven. He was thirteen and beautiful. A ringer for King Kamehameha. He touches the casket gently, lets his fingers rest on its glossed wood. Like Kea, he is wearing sunglasses. His shoulders tremble with emotion. Later, in the evening, he teases you about buying your first surfboard at twenty-eight, and you tell him that you would have bought one sooner if he gave surf lessons. He laughs at that, and his laughter is a balm.
Finally, your baby cousin Ryan, who is no longer a baby, but a sophomore in high school. He is one of the great-grandchildren. He’s lost weight since he was jumped at the end of his freshman year, got mean lickins, his arm broken. He is six foot one and, despite the weight loss, still muscled in a way that belies his teenage scrawniness. You forget how young he is sometimes. He says he doesn’t remember how he got home last night. You want to tell him not to end up like some of his friends. You want to tell him he’s smarter and better at baseball and masculine in a way no fifteen-year-old boy has any business being. He has that calm rage about him that scares you, that makes you want to hug him, that makes you respect him.
When Ryan helps carry the casket to the bed of the truck where the gravediggers are waiting, he, too, is crying. He, too, is using those clean white gloves to wipe his face. He comes to stand near you, and because you want to cry each time you see a man like that crying, you wrap your arms around his waist and lean into him. You let him be a man. You let yourself be a woman who needs his strength.
19) Take a drink for each cousin who brings his fighting cocks to the burial. Be thankful the birds remain in their cages, left in the shade of so many tarp-covered F-150 truck beds.
20) Return to the mortuary for lunch and notice that the crowd of 200 has dwindled to a more manageable 125. Take a sip each time an auntie urges her homemade dessert on you: sweet potato manju, strawberry layer cake, chocolate mochi, guava Jell-O squares.
21) For the remainder of the day, take a drink every time a distant cousin asks how you’re related to the deceased. Why didn’t you remember to introduce yourself? Now three-quarters of the guests think you work for the mortuary and keep asking you where extra toilet paper is kept. (Point them to the hall cupboard.)
22) Take a drink when your uncles pull their trucks up to the side of the mortuary and haul out the big plastic coolers filled with beer.
23) Take a drink for each boy cousin who, upon finishing his lunch, drifts out to join the uncles. The men are leaning against the side of a warehouse adjacent to the mortuary, trying to squeeze into the sliver of shadow the building provides. Their wives/girlfriends/baby-mamas are still inside, talking story. Your aunties are cleaning, placing fresh foil over the aluminum trays of kālua pig and laulau, and carefully loading paper plates with food for each neighbor or friend to take home.
Your uncles and aunties have so many friends—from high school, work, the old neighborhood where they grew up—who have come to support them. A few of the friends didn’t even know your grandmother, but they are still here for your family. They are hugging your aunties, pressing your uncles’ hands, kissing your cousins on the cheek. They are hānai.
Call them uncle, auntie. Kiss them. When they ask whose girl you are, say, “Kanoa’s. You know, Emma’s eldest boy.”
When they say, “Ho, I neva see ’im fo’ long time,” point your dad out to them. He’s with the other men. They leave you, as if in a trance, to go to him, hug him, press his hand in theirs. “Look jus’ like you, da daughta,” they tell your dad, and he nods proudly.
24) Follow your cousins out to the mortuary parking lot. The sliver of shade from the neighboring warehouse has widened. The men are louder now, teasing each other. Take a drink for every story that ends with your dad’s younger brother, Junior, getting lickins. And for the one that involved a homemade bomb and a telephone booth. “I like get all dat change,” your uncle says, defending himself.
Another uncle, the one who will lose his job when the G&R Sugar Mill closes in six months, busts up. “Jus’ like you. Find plenny ways fo’ get paid.” Laugh with all of them.
25) Take a drink for all the stories that compare Junior to his father, your grandfather. Take a drink for every car they restored, every beer they drank together, every football game where your grandpa cheered on Junior.
26) Take a drink when you realize your dad is not part of these stories.
27) Take a drink each time an auntie tells you your dad was not like your uncle. He was not like any of your uncles. He was the quiet one. The sweet one. The one who never made pilikia. He was the one who left.
28) Take a drink when they say you take after him.
29) Understand your dad was different from the outset. Hand him a beer. After all, to be a boy and to diverge; to watch football but not play it; to keep the books for your grandpa’s market instead of unloading the trucks; to leave the island for boarding school; to want to go to college on the mainland; to want to stay there, on the mainland, with only one child to his name, and a girl at that, is to cease to want what men want. Your father is absent from your uncles’ stories not because he left, but because he was never of Kauaʻi in the first place. Because he was in his own world. Because he is Hawaiian, but no local.
30) Take a drink because it’s dark now and you didn’t even notice. You have been awake since before dawn, at the mortuary by 7:30 a.m. You have been in mourning for two weeks, and now the funeral is over. The burial is done. Junior, the son whom everyone knows, has opened up his backyard to the family and extended families, and because it’s Kauaʻi, this could include more than a third of the island. Rachel, his wife, has put out the plastic card tables in one long row. The uncles sit beside the tables. A second row of chairs provides seating for the adult cousins. Junior’s daughter and her husband sit in the outer circle. Auntie Miki, a real tita, like her mom—your grandmother’s sister—is there, too. She sits with the men, in that inner circle.
Stay with the rest of the women, hovering around the exterior row of chairs, coming and going through the kitchen. Outside the house, the men have their food. Inside the house, your younger cousins are watching the Tupac biopic.
31) Drink a beer to wash down the raw crab in chili pepper sauce, the dried ahi, the tripe stew, the squid in coconut milk, the sashimi your uncle made from a filet of ono one of his friends gave him. Poi, chicken long rice, mochi, and lilikoi cake from the neighbors are placed in front of the men. One tray of Chinese noodles has spoiled. It doesn’t matter. Food covers three dining tables, and these are just the leftovers from lunch.
Junior is holding his Shih Tzu in his lap. Her leather collar has “Baby” printed on it in rhinestones. He is snagging a piece of pork katsu with his chopsticks and feeding bits of fried meat to the dog.
32) Take a shot of Crown Royal because someone found it in Junior’s refrigerator and someone else has brought a second bottle and they’re starting to run low on Bud Light, though there’s still plenty of Heineken left. “Da Napilis, yoa grandma’s side, neva drink, dem,” your dad tells you. “But da Pakeles. Ho!”
“I know I one Pakele den,” Junior says, laughing. He hands your dad a beer.
33) Drink, but do not call your mom. Do not call her even though you know she is missing everyone and wants to know what is happening. Do not call her, all the way in California, even though you said you would. When your auntie calls her, do not
ask for the phone, but help pass it around so the other uncles and aunties can say something. Tomorrow you will talk to your mother. Tomorrow you will describe everything. But tonight this is yours. Do not share it. She should have come if she wanted to be a part of it so badly. She would have come if she had been thinking like a Hawaiian and not a haole.
34) Seek out your female cousins, the ones who used to pile onto that rattan chair with you. Squeeze next to Johnell and her husband on the wooden bench, its blue paint peeling on the edges. Accept the beer Johnell hands you. Across from you sits Emmy, the one named for your grandmother, and her husband.
Your cousin Ryan hovers behind the bench. Scoot to make room for him to sit even though he refuses. He busies himself with his phone, but he remains behind you, waiting. Understand he has come to listen to you talk. After all, who knows what you might say? Who knows what someone like you thinks of all this?
Johnell and her husband start to poke fun at the pastor, but Emmy’s husband stops them. He says the sermon was good. He liked it. “That sermon was serious,” he says, and Ryan nods. His lean face is thoughtful.
But Johnell will have none of it. She’s a teacher at Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu, so she knows something about sermons, and this one, she says, was crap. “I didn’t need to think about hell. I was in it!”
Start to laugh—you couldn’t agree more—but then notice Ryan watching you, like he expects an answer from you. Take a sip from your bottle to stall. Try to say something about the goodness of God, about forgiveness, about the pastors you’ve known who have given their own income to help support their parish. Instead, blurt out: “I don’t trust men with manicures.”
Everybody laughs, even Emmy and her husband, and Ryan most of all. He looks at you with a hint of admiration. Suspect that you, too, are leading him astray.
35) When your auntie calls you inside to see photos of your grandparents, take a long pull from the beer bottle. You did not know your grandfather. He died almost forty years ago, when your dad was twenty. Your dad kept no photographs of his father. In fact, you have never seen a picture of your grandfather. Now, the black-and-whites reveal a man with broad shoulders, a puffy face. He pulls more Chinese than you expected. In one picture he is laughing, and his eyes are tight and small. This is how your father laughs. This is how you laugh.
36) Take a shot when one of the women gets so drunk she announces her husband is screwing a Korean. Take another shot when the woman calls the mistress a yobo. Find out the drunk woman is a distant cousin. Her husband is a cousin, too, but from the other side of the family. No one claims the yobo.
37) Drink when the fighting cocks start crowing in their truck beds. Hear their cries echo throughout the neighborhood and a dozen dogs howl in sympathy. No one else seems to notice the commotion. The men still talk story, the women still pack plates of food. You are alone in your listening.
38) Take a drink when your cousin Mano, the one whose brother fights MMA, says he’ll see you out at Bowls. When he smiles his teeth glint against his deep brown skin. He’ll tell the other guys to let you catch some waves. He’ll tell the other guys you’re his cuz. He’ll take care of you, and you know what this means: You are no longer some Honolulu hapa. You are a Napili. You have one more name, another branch of family to whom you belong. One more from which you can’t escape. Perhaps you are not your father after all. “Come see me now, yeah?” Mano says.
39) When you finally make up your mind to depart, do not take a drink. Do not let your dad take a drink. Hand him the keys to the car. He has had only three beers, maybe four, and is at least eight or nine behind the other men. Watch through the window as the resort condos of Poipu give way to Kauaʻi’s last remaining cane fields. Even in the dark, you can see the tendrils of smoke rising from where cane trash has been burning. The air smells acrid and sweet, like toasted orange rind. Flakes of ash fall and cling to your arms, sticky with a day’s worth of sweat. You smell like you’ve been crying. You smell like beer.
Understand that your grandmother is in heaven now, and heaven has fighting cocks and Heineken, poi and dried ahi, your uncles’ teasing and your aunties’ cooking and your cousins laughing with you when you talk. Heaven is them acting like this is where you belong, and if that’s what haole pastors call hell, then thank God you finally got here.
PORTRAIT OF A GOOD FATHER
The photograph hung for years in the screened-in porch beside their family kitchen. Even in Sarah’s earliest recollections, the image is faded from sunlight: her father’s deep brown skin has taken on a grayish hue, the white plumeria around his neck appears to have withered and yellowed, and his black, wavy hair is frosted with white. Humidity has caused the photograph to curl from its backing and bubble slightly in its gilded frame, lending the impression that Keaka is turning toward her.
In the photograph, Sarah’s father is nineteen. He is a little thick in the middle, and his hair has already begun to withdraw from its original line like an army in retreat. But he is unmistakably handsome: his aliʻi nose, flat and wide—the nose of King Kalākaua’s line—flares slightly; his full lips are set in a mysterious smile; his chest is broad and hairless with dark, tight nipples. He is squinting slightly into the sun, and the photographer has caught him at a moment of introspection, at an angle, so Sarah can see his left earlobe.
Sarah will spend many hours staring at the photograph while she waits for her father: waits for him to cook her oatmeal before school, to figure out her math homework so he can explain it to her, to come home for dinner, or dessert, or afterward, when it’s time to put her to bed. During these hours of waiting, she will memorize the lines of her father’s neck, the way he tilts his head to the side as if falling into the sunlight, the smile that teases his lips. She will study the curve of his eyebrows, thick like hers, and the bulge of his biceps, similar to her older brother’s. She will know the photograph as intimately as she knows her own self.
In later years, when she is in college on the mainland, and her roommates ask for a description of her parents—she has brought no pictures of them, only pictures of her high school friends—she will describe her father as he appeared in that photograph, at nineteen, before she was born.
Grace is five months pregnant with their first child when she photographs Keaka. They are at the beach and she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when she notices how the afternoon light catches in his black hair and makes his skin appear to glow from within. She has a camera with her and the lei Keaka bought her that morning when he stopped at the grocery store for more of the fruit preserves she likes.
She tosses him the lei. “Wear it,” she commands as she turns on the camera. He sticks out his tongue, and she snaps a picture. He smiles, slightly embarrassed at the attention, and she takes another.
“Das enough now,” he says. She lowers her right hand and rests it, still gripping the camera, on the beach blanket. She pretends to ignore him, picks up the sandwich with her left hand, and takes a bite. As Keaka turns to look at the ocean, Grace lifts the camera to her eye.
When at last Grace can slip into the white silk dress she has chosen as her wedding gown, she marries Keaka. John, their son, is already ten months old, and Grace’s breasts are heavy with milk. But her waist is almost back to its original size, her stomach relatively flat, and the silk bodice clings kindly to her curves.
The wedding is held on Wilhelmina Rise, at Grace’s parents’ house, on their spacious balcony, which is built into the steep incline of the hillside. The couple say their vows with Diamond Head and the high-rise hotels of Waikīkī as a backdrop, and when the pastor proclaims them man and wife, an ambulance siren can be heard wailing in the distance as if in celebration. Keaka’s aunties make all the food for the reception, even the three-layer mango wedding cake, and his uncles bring cases of beer and raw oysters from Costco. Grace’s family brings wedding gifts: oversized boxes filled with silverware and porcelain plates.
In the living room, the Steele
rs’ game is on television, and the groomsmen have loosened their ties, found a cooler filled with beer, and camped out on the couches. Keaka is in the center, his tie off, his black dress shoes lost in the jumble of slippers on the front porch. John-Boy sleeps in his father’s arms while Grace greets her guests and thanks everyone for coming. She does not ask Keaka to join her in the tedium of hosting, but she resents his easy way of settling into her parents’ home with his friends, with their son, while she, alone, is left to kiss all the aunties and hug all the uncles and say “we” thank you and “we” love you and “we,” “we,” “we.”
For their wedding night, Grace and Keaka book a room at the Moana Surfrider Hotel in Waikīkī, where all the haole newlyweds vacation. They are alone for the first time in ten months: John-Boy is staying with Grace’s parents. Keaka is still a little drunk from the reception, but Grace insists on having a mai tai beneath the huge banyan tree that spreads its limbs over the hotel’s outdoor courtyard. They sit in silence while they wait for their drinks. They both watch the ocean, its white-tipped waves breaking loudly on the beach beside them, and then they drink the mai tais, also in silence. Grace can’t understand why, but she feels sad, and she misses her baby. Her breasts are sore, even though she fed John-Boy before leaving her parents’ house, and she worries her milk is staining the lining of the silk wedding dress.
They finish their mai tais and charge the drinks to the room, and just as they are standing to walk back to the covered porch, a rainstorm blows out from Mānoa Valley. The water comes in sheets and the air smells of tuberose. Grace begins to cry, but Keaka doesn’t notice, for the rain is everywhere, and he’s already brushing her hair from her eyes and pulling her sopping dress over her head. They make love on the bed, their wet clothes in a pile on the beige carpet.
This Is Paradise Page 9