Comfort Woman

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “Got maple bars.” She lay on her stomach, tangled in sheets, eyes closed and mouth open. I walked to her bed to fix her covers, planning to let her sleep, but when I saw her face, I knew she was dead. My mother was an expressive sleeper, quick to frown or smile in her dreams. When I found her body, its face was empty.

  I am both terrified and comforted whenever I remember this emptiness. Because of it, I can hope that my mother did not die caught in a dream as binding as Saja’s arms, gasping and afraid, unable to wake up.

  People tell me it’s a blessing she died in her sleep, at peace. But these are the things said by people who do not dream.

  My mother said she would watch me sleep at night when I was very young, afraid that I would suddenly stop breathing. The rhythm of my sleep was odd, she explained, unsteady as the steps of an old man. The long nights of my infancy were, for my mother, measured by my breaths.

  Later, after my mother tried to drown herself the second time, I realized that our roles had reversed. Even at ten, I knew that I had become the guardian of her life and she the tenuous sleeper. I trained myself to wake at abrupt snorts, unusual breathing patterns. Part of me was aware of each time she turned over in bed, dreaming dreams like mini-trances where she traveled into worlds and times I could not follow to protect her. The most I could do was wait, holding the thin blue thread of her life while her spirit tunneled into the darkness of the earth to swim the dark red river toward hell. Each night, I went to bed praying that I would not let go in my own sleep. And in the morning, before I even opened my eyes, I’d jerk my still clenched, aching hand to my chest, yanking my mother back to me.

  The part of me that watched my mother sleep, the part of me that still lives within my dreams, believes that if I had been home with my mother, holding on to her life with my bare hands, she would not have died. I would have been able to save her. Even now I wonder why I didn’t know my mother was dying; after so many years of training myself to listen, why didn’t I hear that she had stopped breathing?

  And then I realize I was with Sanford that night.

  The last time I sat with my mother in her garden, she told me she wanted to wait to die but wasn’t sure she could. She said something about bathing in blessed water and rolling in ashes, preparing for the final transition. Something about how when she lay down to die, her body marked and open for Saja, she felt my hands pulling at her feet, holding her back. As she spoke, I squatted next to her and watched her prune the vines of the wedelia. I watched the sharp tugs of her hands ripping and tearing the reaching fingers of the plant, and, watching, I lost her voice. Now the only thing about her death talk that I can recall with clarity is the image of the sickle curve of her back bending toward the earth. And the way her bare hands tore at the wedelia, then massaged the black ground, as if she cared for it, as if she loved it.

  Patting the earth, caressing the leaves of the plants she had worked on—saying “goodbye” and “thank you” for the day—my mother announced, “I been waiting a long time to see you settle down.” She brushed a small wedelia flower against the side of her face, dabbing yellow pollen on the underside of her chin. “You need a good man to give you babies. Someone to take care of you.”

  I remember thinking how ironic and how convenient that my mother thought of taking care of me only when I was a grown woman. And even then, to delegate the responsibility of that care. But accustomed to nurturing my mother’s bouts of coherency, I drowned the memories of myself as a child that rose to the surface: huddling under the bridge at the Ala Wai, waiting for a fish to take me to an underwater kingdom where I would find my true mother, a mother who would make me dinner so I wouldn’t have to buy Ho Hos and cheese nachos at the 7-Eleven; forging my mother’s signature on school report cards filled with E’s for excellence that she never saw because she was looking into another world; rocking my mother, cradling her head and upper body in my lap, her legs dangling over the bed, when she cried out for my father, for Saja the Death Soldier, for the spirits that teased her with their cacklings, for anyone who cared, to kill her.

  I swallowed words soaked in anger. Instead of saying, “Why are you worried about me now, Mother?” or, “Where were you when I needed you?” I said, “This is the nineties, Mom.” And: “Women need men like fish need bicycles.”

  My mother straightened, then arched her back, exposing her throat to the sun. I watched her hands come to the small of her back, kneading black dirt into a faded flower print. Her head dropped forward. “Fish?” she said, scowling. “You’re talking crazy. Women need men for children. God listens to men, Beccah. It was your father, praying for forgiveness, wishing for a miracle, who finally pressured God into giving you to us. And when at last you came, your father fell to his knees, held your red body above his head, and thanked his Father in Heaven.”

  I pictured my father as an aging Charlton Heston in the role of Abraham, holding a black-haired Asian-eyed Isaac above the altar in heavenly sacrifice to a God who looked like my mother.

  I laughed. Thinking of how I grew up—in a household of spirits, not one of them my father or the Christian God—I thought my mother was joking.

  “What’s so funny?” My mother reached into her bag of cuttings and flung a handful of nut grass, mud still clinging in clumps amidst the intricate tangle of roots, at me.

  “Nothing,” I said, brushing flecks of dirt off my shirt as I swallowed my laughter. “I just don’t think I’ll ever have children. I don’t want the responsibility of having someone need me that much.”

  My mother dropped her weeds and turned to face me. “What? Don’t you know that babies are the only way you know you’re alive?” She gripped my hand, pressing dirt and flesh into my palm. I could see fine red welts from the wedelia across the back of her hand. “Beccah, how will you know how much I love you if you don’t have your own children?”

  When my mother moved us from The Shacks to Manoa, I changed school districts, leaving Ala Wai for Robert Louis Stevenson Intermediate. I was not upset about this but instead thought of it as a rebirth. I fantasized that by moving out of the orbit of Toots Tutivena and her Entourage, I would no longer be persecuted. In a way, I was right; I was now ignored. I drifted from class to class, sitting in the back row so quiet and hunched into myself that even the teachers forgot I was there. At Stevenson and then at Franklin D. Roosevelt High, except for the other misfits—the unpaired girls with concave breasts or thick granny glasses or hair that frizzed like the Bride of Frankenstein‘s—I was invisible. Safe.

  At times we, the Unacceptables, would gather at the bottom of the library steps as if by accident, as if pulled by an innate instinct for self-preservation to see if we still existed. And there, perched on the lowest step, partially sheltered by the splotchy shade of a plume ria tree, we would practice at adolescence, filling our mouths with the names of boys we loved.

  “Isn’t Shaun Cassidy fantabulous?” one of the girls said. It was probably Cordelia, whom I remember as a giant of a girl with large red knuckles, who could never grasp the “in” lingo. After our high school’s ten-year reunion, which neither Cordelia nor I attended, I heard a rumor that she worked as a scriptwriter for the children’s show Barney.

  “Totally cool,” the rest of us agreed, pretending that we did not consider Cordelia—or ourselves—geeky.

  “He’s the utmost,” Edith sighed. “Let’s add your names together to see if they match.” Edith, who was—at least in the uninspiring academic atmosphere of Stevenson Intermediate and Roosevelt High—considered a math genius, devised a system to establish the compatibility of prospective couples. Based on some numerical values assigned to consonants—vowels were worth zero—Edith would add and divide and multiply our names with those of the boys we loved, crossing out letters and mumbling to herself. The rest of us never quite understood the whys and hows of Edith’s matchmaking rules but were content to wait until she produced the answer, because—no matter which name we gave her—it’d alw
ays come out right. An invariable perfect match.

  If Edith was not at the stairs when we wanted to confirm that the boy we loved was our truest match, despite his not knowing of our existence, we would cast our fortunes with cards, the king of hearts representing the boy we loved. And we would read the sides of our fists to see how many children we would bear. My fist dimpled five times or zero times, depending on whether the reader was generous in defining the bumps. I chose to see five, one bump for each of the children who I knew would look like their father, the one I always named as the king of hearts, the only one I matched my name with: Maximilian Lee.

  All through junior high and the first two years of high school, I watched him. Through eight semesters of advanced English classes, I watched the way he slumped in the chair nearest the door, as if to make an escape at the earliest possible moment. I watched how the shag of his black hair, the part that wasn’t shaved to his skull, fell into his face like a dog’s tail, wagging as he tapped a staccato beat on the desktop with the long, lean drumsticks of his fingers. While the teachers cast frowns at him during their lectures on Milton and Chaucer, Max played his music—ratatatat rataiatat—and smiled. When he smiled I would watch the three moles that framed his mouth dance around his lips, a connect-the-dots invitation.

  Sometimes he would even close his eyes as if he were sleeping, and the teacher, if she was new, would finally slam the chalk down and yell, “Maybe Mr. Maximilian Lee can tell us about palindromes,” or whatever topic she had chosen. And without opening his eyes, he would say something like: “Palindromes are like, you know, when you’re in the tube, yeah? And you’re jammin’ down to the left, and whoom! it shuts down on you. So you maneuver to the right, yeah, but whoom! that shuts down too. Both sides are comin’ in on you, like you’re the candy twisted inside those cellophane wrappers—you know the kind I mean, yeah? Those butterscotch or peppermint-stripe ones. And it’s totally cool being wrapped in the tube like that, even though you know you’re gonna eat it, backward or forward. Like, that’s my metaphor for palindrome, man: you’re gonna wind up in the same place, eating sand, no matter which way you read that wave.”

  Max knew poetry.

  And I knew Max.

  I knew that he saw music on the inside of his eyelids and that he carried a notepad in his plaid flannel shirts so that, when he opened his eyes, he could capture the lyrics and notes with his black-ink Pentel fine writer pen. I knew that the music he wrote for his band, the Too Toned, all sounded like variations of “Stairway to Heaven.” I knew his class schedule, and knew which water fountain to hang out at when his PE class let out. I knew that he brought sprout and eggplant sandwiches from home for lunch, then bought manapua and Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches from the lunch wagon. I knew he called his Ford Mustang “The Frog,” not because of its color—which was a dull gray—but because of the way it hopped, its timing off. And I knew when he started watching me back.

  It was toward the end of our sophomore year, when the Am Lit teacher’s wife filed for divorce. Rumor had it that Van Dyke—whom his students called Van Dick because his zipper often slipped to half-mast—molested his daughter. From the time we heard that his wife had left him, taking the kids to the Mainland, until the end of the year, Van Dyke told us to write poetry in the “Man vs.” series. On the board each week, Van Dyke scribbled either “Man vs. Man,” “Man vs. God,” “Man vs. Machine,” “Man vs. Himself,” or “Man vs. Nature,” and underneath: “Write about it.” Our final assignment—in the “Man vs. Man” category—was to create a tribute to fathers. The poems would be shared in class and the best selected for the special Father’s Day issue of the school newspaper, printed just before summer vacation. I think Van Dyke planned to send a copy to his own children.

  This, or something close to it, was the poem I read aloud:Father

  who art dead in heaven

  because Mother wished it so

  hollow be thy name

  Father

  the black hole

  eating my life

  from the inside out

  feasting on whatever I feed it—

  a platter of grasping fingers

  a snack of salty eyes

  the delicacy of a tongue, still warm from calling your name

  Father

  When I looked up from my notebook, it was to find everyone staring at me, including Mr. Van Dyke. Including Max. After almost four years of loving the way his eyes looked when closed, after innumerable fantasies in which I touched his flickering lids and heard the music they shielded, he opened his eyes and looked at me. And I didn’t like it.

  I sat down when Mr. Van Dyke pushed a tight thank-you out of pursed lips and instructed Cordelia to read. Without bothering to stand or even look up, Cordelia wilted over her notebook, mumbling into its pages:Fathers are the best

  Even though they put you to the test

  Never let you rest

  It’s because they want the best

  for you.

  Thank you.

  While Mr. Van Dyke warbled over Cordelia’s poem, her sophisticated structure and clever use of rhyme, and while the rest of the class rolled their eyes at Van Dick’s pet, Max continued to stare at me. Every day for the next week, he looked at me. And every day the week after, he’d comment on what he saw. “You have a sensitive-looking nose,” he told me once. Another time, he noticed how my fingers matched my voice: quick and soft, breathless as a bird’s wings. Each time he pointed to something about me, it was as if it fell away from me, foreign and unrecognizable. For days after he mentioned my nose, I could feel it ballooning from and shrinking into my face, quivering as if sentient. And even now, when I remember what he said about my hands and voice, my throat closes and my hands fall heavy to my sides, as if afraid they will fly away without me if I speak. By the end of the third week of Max’s attention, I was in pieces, waiting for him to make me whole again.

  The last time I sat with my mother in her garden, I wished to tell her that there was only one time in my life I wanted children. I was a child myself then, sixteen, and held together by the glue of Max Lee’s love. I remember the way Max’s fingers tapped his music on my body, until I sang the song he taught me. The nights my mother flew into her trances, Max would pick me up on the corner and we would chase the sound of Manoa Stream through winding streets until we dead-ended at Aku Ponds.

  Recently, just before I moved away from Manoa, I drove in search of Aku Ponds. After several wrong turns, I let my mind wander and found myself on the dead-end street, in front of the chained bridge that led to the pond. I let my motor idle as I debated testing the picket that held the chain. When I went there with Max, we would wriggle the first picket of the bridge’s railing like a loose tooth until it slipped, releasing the chain.

  Now, as an adult, I am too conscious of the eyes of the neighbors, of the law, of the Kapu sign warning off trespassers. I am too aware that that is what I am now, a trespasser out of place and time.

  In high school, I felt Aku Ponds belonged to Max and me, consecrated through our bodies. As we pressed ourselves against each other, we also pressed into the damp earth of the water’s banks. When we joined, thick blades of sweet Manoa grass and liliko‘i vines would tangle in our hair and limbs, urging and binding us tighter. And when we opened our mouths, deep enough to taste the heart of the other, we also tasted the water of the pond. Aku Ponds was the place where we learned about our bodies. Where I learned the sudden, blind animal taste of a man and the tart taste of myself from his lips.

  After making love, we would sometimes slip naked into the water, lunging through the hip-high water toward the “surf spot,” a place where the pond seemed to double back upon itself. Water from the stream pooled briefly on a shallow shelf before spilling into Aku Ponds. Max would pull me under that cascade, into a gap between rock and rushing water. Pressed against my body, he would say, “This is what it’s like in the tube, like looking through an ice-blue diamond with the sounds so pure you don’t
care you’re about to get smashed.” We’d hold on to each other, looking through water-spun glass and hearing nothing but our own breathing and the hollow sound of breaking water, until our lips turned blue.

  I remember the time he told me that the tube was magical, that the water which poured in front of us would carry our wishes in its song, forever and ever until they came true. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we held hands and sang out our dreams. “I love you,” I yelled into the sheet of water. “I’ll care for you forever!”

  And Max echoed, “I’ll love you forever. We’re gonna get married and have five children!”

  When Max took me home that night, I let myself into the house, my hair still dripping the water of the stream. My body smelled clean, electric like a rainstorm on the Ko‘olaus. But when I walked through the door, my mother yelled, “Stink poji-cunt!” and charged forward with a knife. I backed into the door and cringed, flinging a hand across my face as she sliced the air above my head.

  “Mom!” I yelled. “It’s me! Beccah, Beccah-chan!”

  My mother waved the knife and shaved strips of air away from my body. “It’s me, it’s me,” she mimicked, and I knew then she could not really hear me. “You cannot use my daughter as your puppet, Saja! Evil spirit, the stink of pus and men’s waste!” She jabbed at my head and then lowered her hand until the point of the knife touched my crotch.

  “I call you out!” my mother yelled, and threw the knife across the room. The blade stuck in the carpet, caught vertically for just a moment, and then fell, pointing toward me. “E-yah!” My mother screamed, and rushed to retrieve the knife. “Stubborn ghost,” she muttered. She scratched the knife along the zipper of my jeans and threw the blade again. This time it landed pointing away from me. She left the knife as it lay and went into her bedroom.