Aloha, Mozart

by Williams, Waimea

  The teacher chanted, and the girls moved to her strong voice and the slapped rhythm, E mai, e mai, eia makou . . . Come, come, we are here. A wave flowed forward. The blowhole groaned, then hissed, louder and louder, until a geyser shot up through a lava tube and howled into the air. Water spattered down on the rocks, burst into steam, foamed into crevices. The girls continued dancing as the misty steam drifted inland. Under all the competing sounds Maile had heard only tok-tok, tok-tok, even after the dance changed to a lesson, the teacher demonstrating hand movements, the girls repeating them in silence. She still heard it after they finished and stood trading jokes. Heard it as she’d run home, tok-tok hidden in a rustling cane field, in the whine of a dog, in grease popping on a skillet as Tūtū fried squid for dinner.

  Maile handed in her English test and crept off to recess, not knowing who she was. One of a thousand students at Stevenson, she couldn’t hide in their midst because she walked and talked more slowly than city girls, wore plain homemade dresses, had one pair of sandals for school. Every day she grieved for her lost life with Tūtū. She didn’t miss cleaning chickens, but she longed to go squidding and shrimping, and hear stories about sharks and horses. Honolulu didn’t have either. Her family brushed aside questions about three souls with a nervous laugh, saying, “E, old-timey stuff.”

  As the year passed, Maile’s connection to Kauai withered and her memories wore ever thinner. After a while the ache she felt was replaced by a dull sense that nothing would change, at least not until she got her monthly ma‘i, which would make her an official woman, in charge of her own life.

  THE VOICES FROM the Reef worked in the noisy dining room of a hotel for vacationing military families, four hefty middle-aged women providing background music and comic hula routines. Through the seventh and eighth grades Maile spent afternoons in the aunties’ car in the hotel parking lot, studying Standard English in hopes of sounding less like she came from an outer island. The word “best” replaced “more better,” and her spelling improved: “bath,” not “baff,” and “bathe,” not “bave.” She learned to keep proper English and pidgin separate so that Jade couldn’t accuse her of trying to be haole, and teachers didn’t embarrass her with corrections in class. In late afternoon she listened to the car radio, got dinner from the hotel kitchen, slept, and rode home with the Voices at midnight.

  Waikiki had glamour—a new word—and tourists on vacation did a lot of kissing. After dark Maile often saw couples in the parking lot with their hands under each other’s clothes, the woman’s digging into the man’s shorts, his quick fingers unbuttoning her blouse. They were always white people with sunburns. Hawaiians didn’t stay at hotels or buy souvenirs in the shops. They drove cabs and carried luggage for haole tourists, they cooked, waited tables, hauled garbage, and made lame jokes about being a dumb moke. In Honolulu, Maile now understood, being Hawaiian was not a matter of pride—that was outer-island, rural, Kauai. Here it meant working as a hostess or beach boy and being glad to earn a buck seventy-five an hour. It meant telling people you were also German and Chinese, and feeling good about being German, or any kind of haole but Portuguese, because they worked in the cane fields. Germans had always been too smart for that.

  For Maile the best thing about being around adults so much was that it made her feel grown up. One morning she got proof: while she was dressing for school, her bare breasts brushed against a rack of freshly ironed blouses, and the starched cotton made her nipples harden. Chicken skin swarmed over her arms, tiny bumps that spread up to her neck and down her back. Images from hula songs she had never quite understood came to mind: a squid leg teasing the lips of a cowrie shell, raindrops making a pīkake bud open up. She knew about sex. It had rules and certain kapu, although on Kauai little kids who stumbled upon adults having sex were waved off with a laugh, a curtain drawn or a door closed as the groans of pleasure continued. Lovemaking meant the man got stiff and the woman got excited and they wrestled like champions, no matter how fat, old, or funny-looking, and then each grinned as if they had caught a big fish.

  All through breakfast and walking to school, Maile thought about sex. By the time she reached the dried-out grass around the flagpole, she could think of nothing else. For the past semester she had noticed ninth-grade boys watching her in a shy and hungry way, yet at thirteen she still didn’t have her monthly ma‘i. With faked indifference she had told her sisters and classmates, “E, yeah, got,” but she knew that thirteen was late, way late. Since sixth grade she had been waiting to join the girls who left childhood behind to become women, news announced in solemn whispers during recess or with shrieks in the lavatory as another life changed in an instant. Now she figured that if she just did it with a boy, that would force her ma‘i to come.

  During history and civics she stared back at each boy who offered her love eyes. At lunchtime three of them jostled to eat with her. She chose a surfer and they touched hands under the table, his pointer finger going dig-dig-dig into her palm. After school she dawdled so that she could walk home alone. She pressed her schoolbooks to her chest, and a delicious shiver went from her breasts to her cowrie shell, two tingling lines into one. At the base of Punchbowl she sneaked a look at the boy, who was trailing several yards behind. He had beautiful dark eyes and a bowed forearm from when a wave grabbed his board and flung it, breaking a bone that healed in a curve.

  She led him into an abandoned garden where a pink bougainvillea bush as high and wide as a car concealed them. He said he loved her. They kissed, crookedly, then mashed their mouths together, better than biting into a ripe slippery mango. She stepped back and posed like a movie actress, hands behind her head, elbows out. He yanked down his trousers. His ule stuck straight out like a man’s. She fell back against a tree trunk, jammed the hem of her skirt into the waistband, and pulled off her panties. They did it standing up, sat down wet and dripping, and did it again face to face with her legs locked around his back. They panted in exhaustion, crying tears of excitement, and did it a third time, Maile lying down with the boy on top because they agreed that was how Hollywood stars had sex.

  Finally they lay side by side, gulping in huge breaths of air. The boy scratched his stomach and said he felt as if he’d had all the candy in the world to eat. Maile wiped herself with a bunch of grass, not minding that her cowrie shell hurt. Blood streaked her thighs and now she was a woman.

  MAILE’S TRY-OUT DAY as a paid singer came two weeks after she turned fourteen. By then three boyfriends had not worked out, a secret she managed to keep from her family. A worse secret was that she still did not have her ma‘i, but now she had a chance to enter the world of adults and become a woman in a different way. For the past year the Voices had been coaching her to sing under all sorts of conditions without freezing up. Our girl can pass for sixteen, the aunties agreed, she’s tall and gorgeous like in movies. The expanding clan needed money for all the usual reasons, but the risky plan would succeed only if Maile kept cool head, main thing.

  That afternoon the Voices drove down to Waikiki earlier than usual. Auntie Lani parked her rusted old Chevrolet at Queen’s Surf, where it wouldn’t be noticed, and led the way back to the Moana Hotel. At the end of a long stretch of sand, the entrance to the famous resort was marked by a white-columned porch. Above it rose five stories of rooms with white-arched balconies and white awnings. Tourists strolled up from the beach for cocktail hour. Cool breezes stirred along the shore with the first suggestion of evening.

  The Voices carried ukuleles and wore their best yellow satin mu‘umu‘u. Maile had on a red hibiscus-print sarong, knotted tightly to show off her full breasts and small waist. Her blazing red lipstick matched equally bright hibiscus buds pinned in a fan over the left ear. Her hip-length black hair hung down her back in a swath that swayed lightly as she walked. She had never been to the top-notch end of Waikiki. As they approached the hotel she stared at the front steps, where a pile of leather luggage gleamed like freshly polished shoes. To the left and right was a row of
rocking chairs with cushions.

  “Don’t look so big-eye, make like eeea-sy,” Auntie Lani said, and hustled Maile away to a side door. They all hurried through a hall full of laundry carts heaped with tablecloths, down another hallway where women were folding towels, turned a corner and stepped outdoors.

  In the middle of the Banyan Courtyard, an enormous tree forty feet high and sixty feet wide shaded a long mahogany bar that faced the beach. At the water’s edge, spent waves gently spread out and withdrew. Brown-skinned bartenders sliced pineapples into drink-sized spears. Brown-skinned busboys wiped dozens of little round tables and emptied abalone-shell ashtrays. On a small stage between the bar and the beach, haole men set up microphones for a weekly radio show broadcast to homes from San Francisco to New York. Sometimes, Auntie Lani had been told, the master of ceremonies came early to check the equipment. If not today, they would return each day until he did.

  A stocky red-haired man in swim trunks and a pink aloha shirt walked briskly past the bar out onto the sand. He stood with foam lapping his feet. “Got that bass link?” he shouted to a man putting on earphones.

  “Move,” Auntie Lani told her sisters.

  They advanced, tuning as they went. Directly ahead, Maile saw a frightening array of broadcasting equipment, black boxes and shiny chrome, cords winding up the trunk of a palm tree. Locals didn’t mess with mainlanders who owned expensive things. Seconds ago she had been convinced that she was beautiful and talented, but even being here was kapu. No chance the Voices would work for this fancy-kind. They’d be thrown out, fined by police, never hired again as musicians in Waikiki, forced to get jobs making beds in some cheap hotel.

  The aunties began a soft vamp, dum-da-dum, da, dum-da-dum.

  “Him,” Auntie Lani said quietly. The redhead bent to dangle a microphone over the sloshing water. Maile stood empty-handed in front of the Voices, their special singer. The man took no notice of them. Bristly orange chest hair poked from the neck of his shirt. His pink face and arms were covered with freckles that ran together in blotches, like a mango ruined by fruit flies. He was maybe five foot five, way short, and he flunked all Maile’s tests for good looks. Just give us a job, she thought, you big-time, you Hollywood.

  The aunties hummed in a rich harmony. Maile took a deep breath, picked up the cue, and sang in a pure, straight-on soprano, “Sweet Leila-nee, hev-ven-lee—”

  “The hell?” the man muttered. He turned on them as if attacked. “That’s my theme song!” Maile choked off the last note. The aunties’ strumming stopped. “You can’t sing that,” he shouted, “hear me?”

  They had studied his five o’clock show on their car radio, in the parking lot at the military hotel, and had chosen the piece to grab his attention. But no one could kapu a song. They looked at each other wide-eyed.

  “Well,” he said in a milder tone, “I gotta admit.” He grinned and walked over to them. “You work here? Don’t think I seen you around. Take it from the top.”

  During his show that evening, Maile and the aunties waited for an hour in a side room. Afterwards Danny O’Doyle tried her out on a range of songs in a variety of styles. Okay, he said at last, one song a week on the show, fifty bucks, Voices from the Reef not included. If things worked out, in six months Maile could become his “Polynesian Princess of the Airwaves.” Auntie Lani accepted as her guardian and chaperone.

  On the way to their regular hotel job, the aunties talked over each other in high excitement. Fifty dollars was more than Makua brought home every week after twenty years of driving a bus. The family always pooled their salaries, and this year with all the extra they could buy graduation presents for Kalei and Jackie. Get a new radiator for the Chevrolet. Fill up the gas tank.

  Maile sat in back, silent, until Auntie Lani asked what was chewing her guts. She replied that Tūtū considered singing for money shameful. What if her distant grandmother found out?

  “Nemmind,” Auntie Lani said, “old-fashion, da kine. How we can eat, drive, buy kids’ school stuff?” Maile had to admit that made sense, but something she couldn’t put a name to slipped away from her, another piece of Kauai. She’d had to leave there because of music, because of O patria mia, but that kind of music didn’t belong in Waikiki either. The only trace of it in Honolulu had been the “Halleujah” song on the radio, so it must be something that didn’t matter much.

  FOR MAILE’S FIRST broadcast, Makua assembled the clan at home in Papakōlea to listen to a tourist show they usually ignored. Jade’s boyfriend worked at the Moana setting out and collecting beach chairs, but except for the Voices, no one in the family had been to the hotel.

  At the Banyan Courtyard, bartenders lined up drink glasses and the cocktail crowd gathered. The aunties were allowed to watch from a side hall. Maile stood with them and trembled at the thought of singing for a million listeners. At the same time, after a month of rehearsals she felt so well prepared that nothing could go wrong unless a tidal wave rolled in. She had sung her song so often it didn’t feel like music anymore. Every phrase was timed to the second, which meant not stretching a single note with extra feeling and messing up the schedule.

  The tables under the wide shading tree filled all the way to the back. Danny O’Doyle came over to Maile and whispered, “I want you perfect. Canned pineapple in syrup. Picture all the rough skin peeled off, fruit sliced up nice and neat.” He looked at his watch, walked off onto the beach, and waded into the foam. At exactly five-thirty he dangled a microphone over the water, held up a hand to his technicians, counted off three seconds of sighing surf, then spoke his opening lines: “And nooow . . . as the sun slooowly sinks in the west . . .” Eleven seconds. In the courtyard the clinking of glasses faded into silence.

  On cue Maile stepped up onto the platform—two seconds—and a vast invisible audience expanded in her mind like a liquid map opening across the Pacific to America. Her intro began, eight seconds, music with Danny O’Doyle’s kind of precision, music to fit his word syrup, smooth and full of sugar. No performer was allowed to change a syllable of his show, he’d told Maile, because mainlanders wanted Danny O’Doyle’s version of paradise and he had the formula down pat.

  The microphone head inches from her mouth looked like a little silver coconut. She slid her voice into “Sweet Leilani,” and imagined people at radios in Los Angeles, Saint Louis, Boston, little bits of her souls spread out over them like thin mist. “I dream of paradise . . .” Was her mana shrinking or growing? Was this how it felt to sing for money? “. . . dream come true . . .” Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it was all lōkahi. She didn’t miss a beat, a rest, a cue, and remembered to bow: down and hold two seconds, up and hold one, then get off the stage.

  THE SCHOOL COUNSELOR smiled with friendly professionalism and introduced himself to Maile’s father as they sat down. “Edgar Perkins, fresh from Indiana. Quite an island you got here. I like it.” He eyed the large brown-skinned man with thick black hair.

  In return Makua gave him a wary look. Not even local haole, he thought. In years of raising children he had been called in after school when his boys did something that bordered on getting arrested, but he’d never had those problems with his girls.

  Perkins scanned the Parent Information file on his desk and tried to form a picture of the family. Maile’s father had dropped out of University of Hawaii after one year. Worked as a movie extra in 1938, then became a lifelong bus driver.

  Carefully Perkins read aloud, “Bernhard Lanihuli Manoa,” and started to comment on such an interesting name, but instead said, “Look. The reason you’re here is none of my business, because it’s not happening on school grounds. Ordinarily I’d ask your wife to come in, but I’m told she passed away not long ago.” He paused for a moment of silence. “The thing is, there’s a rumor among the boys here—going on some months now—that Maile’s good for sex with no baby trouble because she can’t hold the seed. She’s had five or six boyfriends.” Perkins lowered his voice. “Girls her age get pregnant on the
first try. I’d take her to a doctor. And talk to her, find out what’s going on.”

  Makua left the counselor’s office feeling more worried than embarrassed. Maile, the daughter he hardly knew, could really sing, was taking a chorus class and loved it. She read music as easy as reading the newspaper. Hermann and Jade still picked on her; no big deal. Kids hit thirteen or so and started running around, but running wild was different. Boys didn’t get raped and thrown out of a car. But she can’t hold the seed?

  At home Jade told him that Maile was at chorus practice until suppertime. “S’posed to be,” she added with a bored smirk. “Girl’s growing up, e?” Makua disregarded the hint, took the rubbish barrel out front for pickup, repaired a fishing reel, and pruned the backyard mango tree. As darkness fell he imagined Maile walking home uphill around the side of Punchbowl: with girlfriends, or alone, or with a boy. She would avoid the thorny keawe trees, pass a ginger grove thick as baled rubbish, then come to a tall clump of bougainvillea that had plenty of space behind it.

  It made such perfect sense that Makua felt as if he’d entered her mind. He drove his truck uphill and down again until he saw a cloud of pink flowers at the side of the road that stood out like colored smoke. A young man slouched in front of it, puffing on a cigarette, cockily tipping up his chin to exhale. Makua stopped, got out, and whipped off his belt. The teenager spotted him and ran, shouting, “Pau ar-ready!” Another teenager bolted from behind the bougainvillea, grabbing at his trousers and dodging the leather strap that swung through the air like a striking eel.

  In the abandoned garden Makua found Maile frantically buttoning her blouse. He let her tug down her skirt, then gripped her shoulders and shook her until she wobbled head to foot. For good measure he whacked his belt across her bare legs. She didn’t cry out, and refused to speak to him. They rode home in burning silence. Her rejection was so strong that Makua’s anger turned to fear that he would lose her and never get her back. At the house she started to leap from the truck and he said, “Wait, sweetie.”