Comfort Woman

  The people in the house, startled by the booming voice coming from the sky, opened their windows and saw a dim light hovering overhead, like the tip of an accusatory finger. Right at this moment, the toad released the string, letting the hawk soar skyward, with the lantern still tied to its foot.

  After seeing with his own eyes the Heavenly Messenger fly back to heaven, the rich man ran into the courtyard and pressed his forehead into the dirt, promising eternal obedience. He asked each of his older girls to sacrifice herself for the family. The girls cried, fought among themselves, pleaded and begged, until, finally, the youngest daughter—who was still considered too young for marriage—offered to give herself to the toad.

  The next morning, after the wedding ceremony, the toad told his bride to plunge a knife into his back. At first she hesitated, but when the toad urged her once again, the girl stabbed him. When the skin of the toad split open, a young man as handsome as an angel and truly one of heaven’s messengers jumped out. Before they could react with joy, the toad angel embraced his bride and his parents and leaped up to heaven, with the three bound tightly to his chest.

  When I think of this story now, as an adult, I realize that the Heavenly Toad is meant to be a benevolent character, rewarding his adoptive parents for their kindness and his bride for either her sacrifice in marrying him or her obedience in stabbing him. But when I was a child, the toad—in his ability to transform himself, to hide in the skin of others—seemed more frightening to me even than Saja, who at least appeared as himself.

  Whenever I walked along the Ala Wai, I searched for frogs and toads hiding in the damp mulch, in stagnant pools along the water. Spotting them squatting in bright-green slime, with only their heads showing, I’d grow dizzy, overwhelmed at the possibility that I was looking at an angel. But I’d always turn and hurry away, repulsed and panicked: what if they turned and saw that in my heart of hearts I found them disgusting? Or worse, what if one of them turned and saw something it liked in me? I kept my face averted and still, neither grimacing nor smiling—not wanting to give insult or false encouragement to any possible toad angel that might want to marry me, kill me, or take me to heaven.

  It was Auntie Reno who gave my mother her first frog. “Heah,” Reno said when she came to our apartment to give us our share of money from the first month of fortune-telling. She dug through her handbag, a Gucci knockoff from the swap meet, and pulled out the small jade piece hanging from a thin gold chain. “Took dis to Vegas—dah city, not my daughtah—but dah money no jump back to me like one frog. Shit, what those Japs”—here Reno flicked her wrist above her head—“eh, scuze me, Great-Auntie Asami, may you rest in peace—talkin’ about?” She jiggled the chain, and the frog jumped in front of my mother’s face.

  The spirits accepted the frog and allowed my mother to wear it during her trips into their world. The customers who visited my mother while she was in a trance, waiting for her to read their lives, saw the frog swinging from her neck. The next time they came, they brought a frog of their own to her, thinking she collected them. Ceramic frogs, pewter frogs, stone frogs, wood frogs—enough frogs to give bodies to however many angels wanted to spy on us—soon infested our home.

  “Whatchu goin’ do wit all them frogs?” Reno had asked when I told her I planned to sell my mother’s house.

  “I dunno,” I told her. “Goodwill, I guess.”

  “Girlie,” Reno said, “let me have em. I sell em, fifty-fifty. All the old customers goin’ want a souvenir from your maddah, the famous frog psychic. I find all the frogs good homes.” Reno laughed like she’d said something funny, then said the same thing she told me when it came time to make funeral arrangements: “Your maddah woulda wanted it dis way.”

  I visited Reno at her old apartment off Punahou only once. It was before we thought of installing the double locks on our apartment, and my mother had wandered away while in one of her trances. I buzzed Reno from the lobby and waited by the intercom for her to come down and help me. Then Reno moved to Hawaii Kai, and the few times I drove over to drop off money for her to deposit, I waited on the porch, watching the long-haired cats she had tried breeding watch me through the large picture windows.

  In my first visit to the house that loops off Kahala Avenue, I circled the courtyard of the angels, waiting for her to come and help me dress my mother’s body. In all the years I have known Reno, I have never been past the entrances of any of her homes, though I suppose she would have invited me in had I asked.

  “Sorry, sorry, girlie!” Reno called out as she wrestled empty boxes and several glittering dresses cellophaned in Hakuyosha Dry Cleaning wrap out the front doors of her home. “Eh, come help!”

  I ran past the fountain and picked up the empty boxes she kicked out in front of her. “What?” I teased, jerking my head toward the clothes draped across her arms. “You can’t decide what to wear to the service? Gotta outdress the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral?”

  Reno folded her lips downward and looked to heaven. “Dis for your dearly departed maddah, may she rest in peace.”

  I almost dropped the boxes. “Don’t tell me you actually bought these!”

  Reno clucked her tongue and held the dresses up like an offering. Her underarms wobbled under the burden. “Puh-lease, honey,” she said. “You tink dey make glamour like dis now-days?” She sniffed, her eyes skittering disdainfully over my T-shirt and cut-off jeans. “Dis from my Hong Kong glory days. Had um made special when I was deah years ago wit dah Royal Hawaiian Dance Company. I was keeping um for when I lose some weight, but ... you know how dat goes. And Vegas, she no want um, telling me, ‘Ma, out of style,’ as if she one fashion arbitrator. I telling you, you young kids dunno the meaning of classic.”

  I looked side-eyed at Reno’s jowls, her wildly gesturing arms, her ample apple-shaped torso, and when she caught me, I raised my eyebrows.

  “Shaddup, you,” Reno growled. “I know whatchu tinking: your maddah and I slightly different size. But a tuck heah, deah, fold dah extra under dah body, and nobody goin’ notice. Not like she goin’ dance around in deah, right?”

  Reno laughed, but I didn’t say anything. I opened the hatch on my Tercel, threw the boxes in, and took the dresses from Reno.

  “Eh, watch yoah fat fingahs!” Reno screeched. “Watchu tinking? Dat beadwork fragile, all hand-sewn-no treat em like one football.”

  I laid the gowns in the back seat, careful to keep the plastic around each of the glittering skirts, the sequined and beaded bodices.

  I cannot imagine my mother wearing Reno’s old bar girl clothes, cannot imagine her in the sequins and flash I once dreamed of wearing myself. Though it is true my mother was accustomed to wearing clothes assigned to her by others. When my mother lent her body to the spirits, they each demanded a different color. The Seven Stars preferred the yellow robe, a tent of sunrise that swallowed my mother’s body from neck to toes. The Birth Grandmother craved the clarity of blue. And Saja, the pig of death, grabbed at anything red, forcing my mother’s body into whatever material—my T-shirts or shorts, a torn pillowcase, a fabric remnant from Kress my mother had planned to sew into a border for our drapes—red his desire for red.

  When I found my mother’s body, she wore an orange-and-green mu‘umu’u bought from Hilo Hattie’s Christmas sale. The bright flowers, the mix and clash of colors, was a sign that she was in her body before she died. Yet I cannot believe that in the end she died alone, without the spirits she lived with surrounding her, without the daughter she had trained to pray over her journey holding her hand.

  Everything that my mother had taught me about protecting the dead, preparing the body and spirit for the final transition, I forgot when I saw her body. “Remember the Heavenly Toad,” she had said, and I did, but it only made me afraid without telling me how to save her. I knelt beside her bed and draped an arm around her waist. “I’m sorry,” I said, half apologetic, half accusing. “You said you would remind me what to do when the time came,
Mommy. But you didn‘t, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Someone once told me that you have to weigh down the eyelids of the dead so that they will sleep forever in peace. After a while that was the only thing I could think of. I dug through my pockets for some change and, though her eyes were already closed, placed a penny on one and a dime on the other. And then I noticed her dress was twisted around her body, tangled about her thighs. She would have been embarrassed to be so exposed. I tugged at the hem and had to wrestle her hips to get it down around her ankles. The coins slid off her eyes and nested in her hair. I plucked them up, deciding they made her look undignified, like a cartoon character. I arranged the hair around her face, folded her arms across her chest in the correct posture of the dead, and called the paramedics.

  Not once did I think about changing her clothes. The mu‘u-mu’ u was the dress she had chosen for herself; I would not assume the same power that the spirits did, as Reno did, by dressing her as if she were a doll to be played with, then posed and displayed behind a case of glass.

  I left the engine running in front of Borthwick Mortuary, partially blocking the traffic pulling onto Maunakea Street. “Reno, I’m not going.” I surprised her and myself with what came out of my mouth.

  “How come?” Reno says. “I get everyting—makeup, dresses, ax-cessories. You supposed help me decide how for present your maddah for her final show on dis earth. All her regulars goin’ come for pay their respects, so your maddah, she gotta look her best, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But—”

  Reno held up her hands. “Nevah mind. I so insensative. Painful for see dah dead body, yah? Some people don’t even like for touch em, the dearly departed, all cold and ooh-jie kine. I understand. Go.” She waved at me, shooing me away. “I do em, dis last ting for my old friend. Don’ worry. I can handle.”

  Reno unfolded herself, pushed her bulk out of the car, and peeled her dresses off the back seat. She held the hangers above her head, fluffing and fluttering her prizes. “Do watchu need for do,” she said. “No worry about me; I get my own ride home.” She cradled the dresses in both arms and marched into the mortuary, looking like she was bearing the headless corpse of a queen.

  I drove without thinking, down Maunakea—Chinatown’s street of leis and the homeless—to the harbor, turning Diamond Head, then mauka, away from the sun. As if pulled by the mist and the rain that perpetually crowned the range guarding Manoa Valley, I found myself returning to the home where I once lived and my mother died.

  As I pulled into the driveway, I saw that someone had piled some debris in our carport: a litter of papers and a large green-and-brown sack, big as a small man. Only when I parked next to the junk did I realize that the pile covered a man.

  At first I assumed it was one of my mother’s clients. Reno had told me that not everyone had heard about my mother’s death and some seekers still waited outside the house, hoping for a spontaneous reading. She said this reproachfully, since I still could not write my mother’s obituary. “Tink of it like you plannin’ for one party,” Reno told me. “Dah obit is one invitation that needs for go out in time so people get chance for get ready: find dah right dress, put on dah right face, buy one perfect flower arrangement. RSVP, li’ dar.”

  I slammed the car door as I got out. The body didn’t move, and when I started to think that I had found another dead person, I heard a mumbling, like someone talking in his sleep. I cleared my throat. The mumbling grew loud enough for me to decipher something like, “Helpings of God, I’ll have two scoops.”

  Inching closer, I planned to wake this person and tell him my mother had died, when—too late, just when I touched what should have been a shoulder—I smelled fermenting mangoes and unwashed feet, the smell of the Manoa Walker.

  I’d smelled him before: once, after grocery shopping with my mother at the Safeway in Manoa Market Place, I made the mistake of meeting his eyes. “You!” he had shouted, rushing toward me. “You!” One of his legs seemed shorter than the other, so that when he ran, his arms swinging, his nut-brown hair swarming around his face and shoulders, he looked like an orangutan. “Read and repent! Read and repent!” the monkey man screeched. “God knows, knows all!”

  My mother quickly stuffed my untied hair down the back of my shirt, then stepped between me and the Walker. “Go, Chudang Kaeguri,” she said. “Stink Toad Spirit, go! You cannot claim us. Go!”

  The orangutan man reached into his pants and pulled out a handful of brochures. He waved them at my mother’s face. “Too late for you, too late, for you have already been claimed,” he taunted. “God has claimed you. His flesh is your flesh. Do you forget the promise of his blood? And a promise is a promise is a promise. Ha-ha ha ha-ha!” He shoved a dirty brochure into one of the bags in the cart. “Thief!” he shouted as he scooted away toward KC Drive-In. “Help, someone help! Thief! The devil stole my Bible!”

  I felt my face burn as people in front of the stores and in the parking lot turned to look at my mother and me. Eyes unfocused, I rushed the cart to the car. “Beccah-chan,” my mother said, tugging me back. “Don’t run. Don’t let him see fear. Those kind will feed on that opening and come back.”

  I slowed my pace but pulled my arm away from her. “I’m not afraid. He’s just a crazy bum.”

  “Crazy,” my mother said. “But, don’t forget, dangerous. Men who love God like that are angels in disguise. That is a Heavenly Toad in a man suit.”

  “Humph,” I scoffed. “That is a little-kid story.” I yanked my hair from my shirt, my fingers combing out the loose strands, which I let fly in the wind.

  “Beccah!” my mother yelled as she tried to catch the wisps. “What did I tell you about holding on to what is yours? This is his territory!”

  As my mother went on hands and knees on the black asphalt of the parking lot to search for my hairs, I got into the car, where I could hunch over and hide in the back seat.

  Later, when I unpacked the groceries, I found the brochure the Manoa Walker had thrown in with the oranges—a tattered advertisement for Instant Checking at Bank of America, with this scrawled on the cover: “A promise is a promise. God is coming for you.”

  “Aaagh!” the Manoa Walker yelled when I grabbed onto his leg. Stinking feet wrapped in the remnants of canvas sneakers kicked out from the top of the sleeping bag, like the back legs of a developing tadpole.

  I felt a shock charge through my hand and could not loosen my grip. The sleeping bag thumped and banged against me as the Walker cursed and tried to wiggle out backward from his sack, and though I pushed against the struggling man with all my weight, I could not let go. Finally, my palm burning, I fell back, and the Walker emerged, born onto the floor of my mother’s carport, bottom first.

  He leaped to his feet, then bent over to touch his leg where I had held it. “My leg is burning,” he whispered, “and it feels so good.” He hopped on one leg and then the other, still gripping the chosen leg, bent double over himself. He stopped, then slowly lifted his head so that our eyes met, and as I stared, his eyes changed from brown to blue. Afterward I told myself that his eyes must have been a hazel that shifted with the light, but the blue I saw was such a vibrant blue, the color found in the ocean of my father’s eyes and God’s.

  When the curtain of blue dropped over his brown eyes, for a moment I thought I saw my father’s face shimmering beneath the surface of the Walker’s features. “Daddy,” I murmured before I could catch myself, before I could quiet the need of the little girl studying the fading image of her father’s face.

  Then the faces rippled, merged into one, and the Walker straightened, his head pulling taller and taller the body beneath it, until he towered above me as I huddled in the corner of the carport. “You burn with the fires of hell, daughter!” the Manoa Walker growled in a voice as powerful as my father the preacher’s must have been. He marched toward me. “Repent before it is too late and join me. Join your mother.”

  I scooted backward. “My mothe
r is dead,” I whispered, a part of me hoping that it was her he was looking for, and that he would leave after he heard the news.

  “Jesus was dead!” he yelled. “And he was arisen! So shall your mother and all who have been bathed in the blessed blood of Christ. Whosoever lives and believes will never die, but be Born Again unto the Kingdom of God!”

  “No,” I said. “My mother was not Christian. She was ...” I stood slowly, my back to the wall, keeping a wary eye on the Walker, trying to find a word to encompass my mother’s beliefs. “She was, uh, Korean,” I blurted.

  “She is a lamb in God’s flock,” said the Manoa Walker, “and I’ve come to collect the one stray. Do not forsake me. Do not deny me.” When he took a step closer toward me, I shot my hand out in warning. The palm of my hand, meant to halt just shy of his chest, brushed it so slightly that the flannel of his shirt felt like air on my fingertips. Blue fire crackled between us, and the Walker fell back as if he had been shot. He dropped to the ground, clutching his chest. He curled, forehead to knee, a cooked shrimp shriveling into a C.

  And when he stood again, shoulders hunched, with eyes that scuttled in brown and blurry confusion, his head reached only to my shoulder. “Get mac salad wit’ the KC special?” he asked, and then he looked at his sleeping bag, at my oil-spotted carport, at me. “Oh no, it happened again, see it happened. Blue light, spaceship, aliens, microprobed.” He rambled on, muttering as he scrambled to collect his belongings. “Abductions. Enquirer wants to know.” He gathered his belongings into his arms and ran down the driveway, scattering several brochures for credit cards and savings accounts along the way.

  I sat in the driveway for a while after he left, nursing my hand, which tingled as if I had plunged it into ice water and was just getting the feeling back. My fingers still hummed as I entered the house. I shook my hand, but instead of dissipating, the tingling grew, vibrating through my arms, my shoulders, into my chest.