Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  The four of them stared silently as the taxi made its way up the old driveway lined with giant eucalypti. It was June, time of “Kona snow” white coffee blossoms washing the countryside with gardenia smell. The plantation was comparatively small, so planting, picking, sorting were all done by hand. In September when harvest was in full swing, flocks of Mexican, Micronesian, Filipino migrants would labor with baskets belted round their waists, picking ripe red coffee cherries, inside which was the jade-colored coffee bean.

  Seeing the taxi sliding up the drive, workers in the fields yelled back and forth in Pidgin.

  “Eh! Look, see. Pono girls come home!”

  Up on the hill in the sprawling old house, Run Run cooked squabs full of ginger, garlic, lotus bulbs, black bean sauce on aku, lomi salmon, the girls’ favorite dishes. While Run Run banged around, Marlboro sagging from her lips, Pono stood on the front lānai, heart banging so hard, her hair shivered. As the taxi drew nearer, she saw their faces turned her way, features growing clear.

  There were other grandchildren, but these four—Rachel, Jess, Vanya, Ming—were the ones who returned year after year down the decades of their lives, as if some swerving structure in their cells warped them forever backward to this lush, forbidding matriarch. Now she seemed to draw them up with her eyes. In a sweeping white mu‘umu‘u, long silver hair splashing her hips, her dark brown skin absorbed the light as if her power, her mana, forbade reflection. Stepping from the taxi, gazing at her, each woman felt fear bubble up, the girlish desire to please.

  Pono studied them as they struggled with their luggage. Jess—ruddy-skinned, in kahki jumpsuit, jungle boots, hair shorn like a recruit. Pono couldn’t imagine that place where she lived, Manhattan. She had seen news reports, an island where people ate their pets, flung children from rooftops. And there was Vanya—intransigent, matronly, in tailored dress and “toepinch” shoes, trying to rein in her voluptuous looks. Rachel wore a simple dress, cardigan over her shoulders. But the dress was made of costly crimson Kyoto silk. Pono’s eyes snagged on her face bare of makeup, leaving her beauty naked, therefore more startling. Who does she fool? Pono thought.

  She turned lastly toward Ming, still sliding from the car. The shock. It had been a year since last she saw her. Now this daughter of her favorite daughter, Holo, looked suddenly aged, more sixty, than forty-five. Pono momentarily closed her eyes, keeping her balance. She has stepped outside us, the constant pain.

  Now Run Run came screaming and chattering from the kitchen in her frayed, sun-bleached dress, rushing right past Pono.

  “Ay, look, look, dey all come togedder! Who I goin’ kiss first? Quick, come hug yoah aunty!”

  They gathered round like feeding birds, while Run Run sobbed, embracing all of them, then each in turn.

  “Mot’er God, look dis haircut! Jess look like one boy! Rachel, where yoah face? All naked like dat, shame! Vanya, Vanya, get out dem ugly, high-tone clothes . . .” Turning to Ming, she stepped back, her hand flew to her ribs.

  “Ming, Auwē! You look too tired, make me cry.”

  “Ming smiled, pale face benevolent and wise. Black hair pulled back severely in a bun, eyes blurred behind glasses, she seemed an aging academic—someone retired from discourse, from other humans. Run Run spun round, gazing at each of them, a wiry, little thing radiating all that was home, love, continuity. Above her on the lānai, their grandmother’s arms winged out in welcome, so she was momentarily poised like a statue. And it was as if the two women had been built there a century ago with the house and the coffee trees and the fields, as if they were carved out of the lava island itself, living ghosts haunting their genes, giving notice that they were home.

  Then, as if she were the mother and Pono the child—unimaginably large, ferocious and moody—Run Run dragged the cousins up the steps like offerings, like dolls. They climbed slowly, gazing at Pono, her eyes unwavering, locking on each of them, searching out, dividing them, so each woman moved forward alone. Vanya held back as always and, perversely, Pono reached for her first, holding her distant, then hugging her.

  “Vanya. You stay away too long.” Though it had only been a year. More often than that was almost lethal, they were too much alike. Now, Pono pushed her gently away, her scent a sudden blow. She reeked of haole.

  Ming came next, pale as a moth, melancholy eyes, frail little body.

  “Ming, oh, Ming.” Pono hugged her the longest time.

  Rachel thrust herself forward wanting it over, feeling Pono’s fingers appraising the fabric of her dress as they embraced. Then Pono patted her back, dismissing her. Jess felt her grandmother’s eyes devour her even before she let go of Rachel. Jess moved to her, whispering “Tūtū!” and Pono hugged her in silence. Most things that occurred between them would always be accomplished wordlessly, a choreography of looks.

  Run Run danced round them pealing with laughter and relief, chattering nonsensically, leading them upstairs to separate rooms, joking, pinching cheeks, pinching bottoms.

  “Jess, too thin! What dey feed you on da mainland? I gonna’ stuff you wit poi. Good foah make you fat!”

  Jess collapsed on the bed, hugging the old woman, loving her snaggled teeth going at crazy angles, her breath redolent of Marlboros.

  Her voice went plaintive, she fought back tears. “Three years! She didn’t even say she missed me.”

  Run Run turned quiet. “She miss you too much. Like miss yoah mot’er.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She hates me. She never answers my letters.”

  “She yoah blood, yoah history. Someday maybe she explain you many t’ings.”

  “I’m forty, Run Run. I have a grown daughter. How long do I have to wait?”

  Run Run laughed. “You got a choice? You wait. Like de others.”

  She kissed her cheek and left, moving on to Vanya’s room, then Rachel’s, Ming’s—loving the life they brought to the big house, the crazy stirrings, loving their defiance, their fear, pigheadedness, instincts that connected them, all the silent rituals of blood. They were her little tribe of “many kine colors,” skin different-hued but underneath, what she called “best kine blood, Hawaiian.” Most of all she loved them, each one, for not seeing how much they resembled their grandmother.

  Pono listened to them upstairs, chattering, gossiping, running in and out of rooms, then silence, their slow, stately descent downstairs. During dinner, she eyed them suspiciously, looking for change, but saw each woman had not deviated in her devotion to her, her fear of her, a fear she intentionally instilled. Someday when she was dead, they would know everything, and maybe they would hate her. Fear was the first step; she had taught them well.

  Watching them bend over their plates, she saw how Vanya and Jess still ate voraciously, a way of avoiding her eyes. Rachel played with food, never seeming to actually eat. Now she sat toying with bamboo shoots, a pigeon heart, a beet, exclaiming over colors, how they mixed, bled, clashed.

  Pono tapped her plate, “Run Run spent long hours on this meal. Fill the ‘ōpū, not the maka.”

  Run Run dashed in from the kitchen, covering the long mahogany table with more steaming dishes. “Vanya, tell us! You see kang’roo in Austraya?” She dashed out and returned, carrying a second bowl of rice. “Jess, how life in dat crazy Manhattan? It close to Cleveland? What da speed limit?” Her proliferation of questions, the same old questions, putting them at ease. “Rachel, what new t’ing Hiro bring you from Hong Kong? I like see dese treasures!”

  Finally, she sat down with them, shoveling food between her great nicotine-stained teeth. Only then did Pono visibly relax. And in that magisterial repose, a signal: the other four relaxed, looked round the place, its windswept lānai. Only then did they glimpse the orchards, fields of “Kona snow” billowing out toward cliffs and far below the sea. Only then did they feel the ocean in water-haunted sunlight that lay across each room, making objects shiver. And only then did each woman feel impervious to the outside world, as the house closed round them.

  S
o many sweet, dormant nights here, so many years, where childhood had faded into womanhood. Theirs were the fingerprints left on family albums, half-eaten photos of long-ago whalers and Tahitian beauties playing croquet with the king. Photos snapping and curling in corners where mucilage had dried, generations of photos until Pono. Then the albums had become something else, a world that mysteriously excluded men.

  After dinner that night, Pono braided her hair in a long snake, pulled on high-top shoes and a big canvas jacket, left the house, and pulled up in her oxidizing Jeep.

  “There’s things I want you to see,” she said, waving the women into the car. “Too much is happening, developments, controversy round the island.”

  She drove onto a paved road, then after a while, turned onto a long dirt road that led to a sacred wooded area outside Captain Cook, now threatened by Japanese and American developers.

  “They want to raze this rain forest of old koa and monkeypod and ohia trees, build five power plants right over ancient, burial shrines.”

  The power plants would generate electricity that would be cabled over to the islands of Maui and O‘ahu, keeping empty high-rise office buildings lit all night. The sacred trees would be splintered into wood chips, burned to generate further electricity.

  The women sat quietly, staring into mist-shrouded trees, a place where it was said “Night Marchers,” ancient warrior ghosts, rested during the day. They heard faint murmurations. Jess felt bumps rise on her arms, saw Vanya lean forward, intent. They sat in utter silence, and after a while Pono backed up and turned around. As the Jeep rolled quietly away, something called after them.

  ’“Ainaaaa . . . ‘Ainaaa. . .” The land. The land.

  Pono drove back to the highway, kept to that course for a long, silent time, then after forty minutes or so, they entered the southern quarter of the Big Island called Ka‘u District. There she drove toward the southeast coast, an area of primeval cliffs and thunderous waves called Ka Lae, South Point. She turned off the igniton, staring at the cliffs.

  “A huge spaceport being planned. Here on the first grounds of our ancestors!”

  Vanya spoke up, already familiar with the plans. “The only area in the U.S., they say, where satellites can be launched into equatorial or polar orbits. Such a spaceport would deprive local fishermen of free access to the island’s best fishing grounds. It would bring outsiders to fill technical jobs needed. Lifelong residents would lose their land.”

  They stood gazing along the coastline, site of earliest Polynesian landings almost two thousand years ago, site of ancient villages and fishing fleets, and sacred heiau still being excavated.

  “Between here and Miloli‘i up the coast,” Pono said, “they’re building a nine-hundred-million-dollar Riviera Resort with marinas, the whole works. Chemicals, oil pollution, sewage. It will kill the fishing and the reef, impoverish all the ole-time net fisherman of these small coastal villages. I tell you it will kill off everything this side of the island.”

  She walked back slowly to the car; they followed close behind. “Why I’m telling you girls this . . . locals want me to join in the fight against its development. If I do, it will divide my workers, affect the coffee-harvesting season. Haole coffee distributors will blackball our plantation like before.”

  Later, back in the house, the women sat self-consciously, Pono eying each of them.

  Finally, she cleared her throat. “Since you four will soon inherit this place, you need to make a decision on these things. I won’t live forever.”

  The silence was palpable. They had never believed she would not live forever.

  “Tutu,” Ming said softly, “you have many good years . . .”

  Pono waved her hand impatiently. “I have had today. This is all I know. And I am growing tired.”

  Alarmed, wanting to distract them, Vanya spoke up, explaining she had already offered her legal services to the coalition fighting the spacesport.

  “What we have so far against spaceports is pretty impressive. We know that aluminum oxide poisoning is a by-product of solid rocket fuel during a launch. Alzheimer’s disease is tied in with aluminum ingestion. We know clouds of polluting smoke from rocket launches inhaled by humans and animals are full of deadly toxins. A spaceport would conceivably destroy the ecosystem of the entire island. Pollutants will poison fish for miles around.”

  The others joined in, Jess offering medical opinions, Ming asking for the source of Vanya’s information. With her granddaughters distracted, Pono sat back eyeing them, wondering who of them would really mourn her when she died, who really cared. Years yawned backwards and she saw herself warily welcoming her two oldest daughters, Holo and Edita, to the Big Island so their girls could meet Rachel. Then losing them again, alienating them, this time forever. And she learned how not loving, not having the love of one’s children, diminishes the soul. Slowly, as her daughters’ daughters returned summer after summer, she began in subtle ways to show them how they needed her, her wisdom, her mystery.

  She instructed them in ocean ways. How eating certain seaweeds let them swim for hours without tiring. How to outsmart riptides by giving in. What shellfish were poisonous, and how to ride giant manta ray and dolphin. How to roll up in a ball when facing shark, how to tame shark, follow them to sleeping coves, and float beside them. And at what hour on a secret beach, the Pacific rolled in jewels from the Orient. She tried to show them how women could do anything, and do it competently. How problems could be worked out if they ignored what people said and did what conscience required.

  And always she reminded them, “Don’t be drifters and dreamers. Don’t get caught.” Which the girls had interpreted as, “Don’t be like your mothers.” And so there had always been confusion in what she said, and what her granddaughters heard.

  That night, hearing the squeak of bare feet on koa floors, she smiled, imagining them, full-blown women now, in white sleeping sarongs, running to each others’ rooms. Ghosts of their girlhoods, like flames licking through the dark. She turned sideways on her pillow, imagining them huddled in one bed, still comparing their differences, their allegiances. Then she sighed, preparing herself for sleep.

  Each night was a ritual now. Ingesting certain herbs that would clarify her dreams, Pono slept deeply and long, waiting for dreams to tell her how, and when, she would die. But dreams did not tell, they gave no clues. In sleep, she saw a corpse rocking on the ocean floor, but, as always, it was faceless. She jumped awake, suddenly terrified. It is Duke’s corpse. He is going to leave me behind. She willed herself back into dreams, trying to see the face of the dead.

  Restless, Jess walked barefoot through starlit coffee fields, her senses reaching out to the land, the land giving itself back to her in luxuriant gifts: smells, night sounds, damp soil underfoot, sea air detonating high in the roof of her mouth. Seeing the light in Vanya’s window, she paused, watching her cousin’s silhouette on the shade. She had always coveted Vanya’s rich, dark skin. Not yellow, not caramel, but brown, the true golden-brown of Hawaiians. And she knew there had been years when Vanya envied her, hated her. The walls of your white soul. Making Jess feel bleached, useless as a root.

  Tempestuous, always outspoken, this trip, Vanya was subdued. Lying with the others in their sleeping sarongs, she had said a strange thing.

  “She knows. She could smell haole on me. I absolutely reek.” It came out of her so abruptly, so unexpectedly she got up and left the room.

  Now, reflecting on Vanya, and Pono, and how Pono’s beauty was duplicated in Vanya’s face, her body, her gestures, Jess realized for the first time that this cousin, the one ever at odds with their grandmother, was probably the one most loved. I used to think Ming was her favorite. But she’s grown too private, too remote. Rachel is lost. And I am too haolefied, what my mother taught me, so we could survive in that other world, the one that killed her. It’s Vanya, it was always Vanya. She walked on through fields, heard dancing hoofs of a trotter, and saw someone approaching on horseback. It
was Toru Sasaki, grandson of Run Run. They hadn’t seen each other in several years.

  From her window, Ming saw the figure on horseback slow down, cry out, slide from his saddle. She saw them embrace, spinning each other like brother and sister. She smiled, drew her shade. Reclining on an elbow, undoing the sash of her kimono, she arranged it round her comfortably, then reached for a pea-size wad of dark amber gum and her little bamboo pipe. Striking a match, she lit the pipe, dragging deeply, dreamily, repeating the gesture until she was stretched back completely, languorously, the pipe finished, in the bowl a tiny corpse.

  “Toru,” she whispered. “Forgive me.”

  Vanya

  * * *

  IT ISN’T LOVE. Maybe it isn’t even lust. Maybe we just found a way to help each other sleep . . .

  She brushes her long, wiry hair, sniffs her arms, her wrists.

  . . . Three days since Darwin, still the haole smell. Hit Tūtū like a blow. The bitch. When did she become my judge?

  She slides onto soft white fragrant sheets, air so damp and cool it leaves a sheen, like sweat. She remembers his sweat on her, all over her. She vows she will not fall asleep thinking of him.

  . . . First time we made love, him unbuckling that gun strapped to his calf. Was that supposed to turn me on? Make me hot? And during the night, him rising soundlessly, buckling it back on, then lying down again, the thing cold like a reptile against my leg. Just before dawn this rough beast in me again, my dirty secret. Casting my lot once more with an outcast. Jesus, you think I would have learned. . .

  In that mild twilight of fatigue, waiting for sleep she forages backwards through the years.