. . . Sixteen, passing pigs sniffing coils of their own shit. Swinging my lunch pail toward Dole Cannery. Hating the life. Pineapple rash, hands slashed, sometimes screams, a woman’s lopped-off finger. While up in Makiki Heights, rich whites using fingerbowls! Working that cannery for two summers saving for university. Christ, how I hated it, hated being mix-marriage mongrel. Hated seeing snot-nosed kids baubled with flies, mothers sucking warm cans of Primo. Smell of pineapple still makes me sick . . . lunch pail full of sad same lunch—dried fish, riceballs, kimchi. Rachel eloping, beginning her waiwai life with Hiro. Jess and Ming over on the Big Island lolling around like debutantes while I slaved at Dole . . .
. . . Asking Mama, “Why can’t Tūtū help with my tuition? She has that big house.” Mama screaming, “You ask nothing from her. Nothing!” Me asking anyway. “She no got da money,” Run Run says. “Fightin keep dis place goin,’ so can leave for you girls.” Fuck it, then. Do it all alone, and doing it. Ten, twelve hours on assembly line, so tired can’t sleep, can’t stay awake. Tourists taking pictures, quaint island girls with lunch pails walking home to slums. Foreladies wonder why we spit in cans of pineapples going to the mainland . . .
. . . And entering university in Manoa Valley, frightened every day. What am I doing there, who do I think I am? Haole students so well dressed, Orientals smarter. Silently swearing I will wear my fingers down, my eyes, I will die becoming something better. Smoothing out my English. Swallowing Pidgin, denying it, saving it for home, for “slang.” This tongue I was born with, raised on, this part of my mouth demeaned, thrown out like garbage. Mama trying to keep up with me, ironing out her Pidgin, ironing other people’s clothes, Papa telling her put down the iron, go to Dole, better wages at the cannery. She cringes. All her life the image of her mother’s missing finger . . .
. . . Papa coughing up in sunless rooms, small bones, frail ribs, propped before a black-and-white TV. His welfare checks, six-packs of Primo. He and friends ripping off hotel delivery trucks, selling their stash. Who could blame him? Five years refrigeration school, five years work, wife, children, to support. Then laid off, his heart. Six months, his heart improves. His job now filled by haole from the mainland. Papa waits for job opening. Waits six years before he understands. No Flips wanted, still the bottom of the pile. He becomes a piece of furniture, propped in the living room before TV, prefiguration of an early grave . . .
. . . University . . . this haole wahine professor . . . a fondness for hugging me, which repulses me. Can’t stand the idea of one of them touching me. Fish-belly skin, freckles, yellow teeth, their smell. And watching the news, violence on the mainland, a black boy charred, body parts dispersed. Sometimes in class, I’m the only dark-skin in a room of whites. I panic. Will I get out alive? Sometimes hating my Hawaiian mother, Filipino father. Sometimes hatred of myself. Men saying I’m beautiful who only want to fuck me. Maybe afterwards they will shit on me . . .
Vanya tosses back and forth, memories jolting her awake, feeling the old resentments, the rage. And something else. The utter loneliness of those years.
. . . No one to talk to on campus, my slum friends thinking I’ve gone high-tone, fancy-dancy. Can’t even talk to “feminist” professors . . . the ones who see local women as “minority women,” abstracts. Never ask us about our rage. How we manage to get through the day without killing. Where do we live, how do we eat? And breathe? Come on home, bitch. I will show you things. I begin to cultivate a who-can-l-knock-down-look. I begin to understand oppression . . .
. . . All those years a virgin, unaware of deep hunger between my hips. Until Ta‘a Utu, handsome Samoan working his way through University, fire-dancing at the Moana. Me full of rum one night, getting up on stage, dancing shamelessly with him. Football scholarship, dark, muscled halfback with the gift of grace. Me burning when he swallowed fire . . . When did I first love him? When he entered me? When we woke in moonlight, his skin smelling of gasoline and cinnamon? His big hands holding my buttocks like loaves. No one had ever looked at me that way, treated me that way . . . deep, deep respect. For who I was, what I thought, my boundaries. “I will not go deeper inside you than you permit.” Ta‘a saying he would marry me after Stanford, graduate degree in engineering. Him telling me to go on, go on, be someone, apply for scholarships. And getting one . . . University of Chicago. Law! Neighbors laughing at my ambitions. Me laughing back. Yes. I will be a lawyer, crawl out of the maw chewing up our race. Mama weeping, Papa dumb. “How will you survive over there?” . . .
. . .BY WEARING IMAGINARY WHITE SKIN. By working part-time, full-time, anything. And getting off that Chicago plane terrified, so terrified. Knowing if I didn’t freeze to death, the next three years would bleed me dry. And mainland classmates “nicing” me to death. “Where exactly is Hawai‘i?” “What language do you people speak?” And townies with their bloodshot eyes, yelling from their pickups. “Hey, Nigger. Wetback. Bitch.” Serving burgers at a fast-food. Switchboard operator. Two jobs, six days a week. Walking home at night, razor blades taped to my fingers. Scissors up my sleeves. Studying alone, eating-living-crying alone. Wanting so badly to make it, be adequate to my dreams . . .
Vanya sits up in the dark, weeping, remembering how in desperation she flew west and spent a weekend in a cheap Reno motel with Ta‘a, both so homesick they looked pinched and old. His complaints of Stanford—racism, elitism, having to compete with men from Yale and Princeton. And Ta‘a quitting Stanford in his second year. She shakes her head, remembering an eighteen-hour flight to Apia, Western Samoa, from Chicago. Their rendezvous. Their vows. And meeting his family, pure Samoans, proud, lighter-skinned than Vanya.
. . . And me with Flip blood. Jesus. His mother telling me in the softest voice, they had already chosen Ta‘a’s bride, daughter of a high chieftain. Ta‘a weeping, explaining. “It is my father’s wish. If I do not, I will be cast out from family, tribe.” My swift departure. Calling Jess long-distance. Bypassing Honolulu, Chicago, arriving drunk in New York City thirty hours later. Jess apprenticing as a vet, washing out acquarium tanks, tending convalescent animals. Polite disdain of the pale, blond Southerner she’s dating. As if my skin were striped. And getting lost, picked up for loitering on Park Avenue. La-di-da doormen thinking I was cruising, a Harlem hooker, and calling cops. Jess standing in the precinct station red-faced. Cops apologizing while she screamed. “She’s my cousin! She’s studying law!” As if that changed the color of my skin . . .
. . . Two mix-marriage mongrels weeping in her bed, arms wrapped round each other like lost girls, wondering how we got there? Where were we? Who was I? And who was she? Me telling her that city would kill her. It would noise her to death. A year later Jess calling me long-distance. What the doctor did to her. O Jess! Jess! Maybe that was when I really loved her, when I saw how much she kept inside. (When we were young, how many times I hit her in the face, not very hard, not because I wanted to, only to satisfy the different colors of our skin) . . .
. . . So many times in those Chicago years, calling the Big Island, crying collect. Pono on the phone, voice deep, mean, but somehow kind. “How bad you want that law degree?” “Enough to kill for,” I cry. “Then kill the fear. Be strong.” Once, I thought I heard her say, “I am very proud.” And finally, coming home, marrying Rigo, handsome Flip, secondary math teacher. Marrying because he admired me, would not compete with me. And because I had spent too many years alone.
She thinks back on the early years of practice, the struggle as a native. And a woman. Working for the Honolulu Legal Aid, fighting for native Hawaiian land rights, more jobs, more food stamps for low-income families. The senior partner of her firm expecting her to serve his coffee and doughnuts, asking her to dig up files while he studied her behind. Moving to another firm, working to improve prison conditions, and seeing so many of her childhood friends behind those bars, following the maze from juvenile hall to prison, life incarceration.
The years became a decade, Vanya’s life dedicated to fighting for
reforms. Fighting banks withdrawing business loans from Filipino barbershops in favor of more profitable Chinese restaurants. Fighting the stripping of Hawaiian students’ scholarship funds in favor of brighter, more promising Orientals. The futility. Then Vanya and two colleagues struggling to incorporate a female law firm. Bank loans turned down seven times. Banks saying women didn’t have the clout, would never attract clients. A bank officer, suave with tiepin and matching cuff links, staring at her breasts. Vanya staring at the scissors on his desk.
. . . (Five years passing, Ta ‘a Utu not fading from my dreams. Smell of cinnamon, even gasoline, leaving me breathless, inarticulate.) Late seventies . . .
Nationalist movement growing, Hawaiians wanting back their lands, their Mother Tongue. Thirty high schools and colleges voting to secede. “From what?” Mama asks. “From the United States, from desecration of our lands, economic slavery of our people.” Papa sucking his Primo . . .
. . . Tense summers at Pono’s, her coffee business thriving. Making us eat dinner by candlelight like haole! My cousins so manakā. Ming buried in academia, her books, her Bach. Rachel practicing the shamizen for Hiro, his little concubine. Me screaming, calling them names, wanting to snap them out of that bog of apathy. Pono looking like she wished me dead. Saying she was not a racist. Who was she kidding? Who ate at table with her besides Run Run? Not the little Puerto Rican girl who washed vegetables, not the Filipino housemaid, not the Filipino gardener. Not Ming’s father. Not my own . . .
One night Vanya had gone to Ming, reminding her how their parents had slaved. Ming’s Chinese father, Tang, a shattered-shoulder cook, her mother, Holo, ten years attendant in a women’s prison, years she would not talk about, now a woman sewing other people’s clothes. Vanya’s father finished, her mother, Edita, eyes gone from all the years of spraying starch on other people’s laundry. These women who had survived Pono, still sacrificing parts of themselves, their daughters, throwing them across the channel every summer so they would know their cousin, Rachel. Did Pono ever help them, even send them bags of gourmet coffee beans? No. Nothing.
Then one night Run Run had handed her a check. $1,000. “From yoah tūtū, and a little bit from me!” Stunned, Vanya asked, “For what?” Run Run had laughed. “Foah Kokua Hawai‘i . . . Silly girl! T’ink we no care?” Vanya running to Pono, hugging her, and -Pono turning away, collecting herself, turning back and looking Vanya in the eye. “Be strong. Dare everything.” And Vanya feeling for the first time maybe this woman understood her. Even loved her.
. . . And all the while my boy, my keiki kāne, Hernando, growing up. Now at Punahou, private school. Wants to be a judge. So bright he skips two grades. But they discourage him from college preparatory courses, suggest auto mechanics, carpentry. Be a doorman, plumber, cop. I threaten to sue, pull him out of Punahou, put him in McKinley, public school with high scholastic standards. Competing with smart Orientals, he holds his own, my pride. And me traveling the South Pacific, networking with other native Nationalist women. Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Australia. All fighting for same issues, equal wages, housing, education, recognition . . .
. . . One day in Auckland, this face stepping from a crowd. In suit and briefcase, Ta‘a Utu. We stumble into a shop, finger souvenirs while staring at each other. “. . . Never forgot you, Vanya . . . dream of you.” Examining sheepskin jacket, jars of Waitaiki tongues. “I hope you’re miserable. I hope your wife is bowlegged.” Him laughing, and then tears. “I named my second daughter, Vanya, after you.” Six nights together in that Auckland hotel, forgetting meetings, forgetting everything, describing our lives, the struggle, the bureaucrats. The man I married out of loneliness and gratitude. “He teaches math, gambles, watches ‘The Love Boat’ on TV. My son, Hernando, big, robust. Ten years old, looks like fifteen. Pure Polynesian-looking.” Me lying there, wishing Hernando were Ta‘a’s son . . .
. . . And it begins, my monthly trips to Auckland, Ta‘a meeting me. Five children, he will never leave his wife. “Then this will be enough,” I say. My tongue burning, shaping itself to compromise, take crumbs from another woman’s life. My body burning, knowing it moves and pleases, swallows, another woman’s husband. Nothing can help me now. My cells are hooked, holding on, holding fast. I am a woman who holds fast. I think of Rachel and her unspeakable marriage. Alike, we are alike. Dumb, with a floating serenity of blind intent, loving out of all reason. Our drowning shadows waiting for our drowning . . .
. . . So makapō! I don’t see that drowning shadow waiting for my son. So driven by my loins, I let time go. And he is twelve, looking seventeen. That summer strange . . . typhoons, shark attacks, infants disappearing from their cribs. And natives swimming for Kaho’olawe, island of sacred Hawaiian heiau, protesting U.S. Navy bomb testing there, fifty years of blasting it with rockets. Hernando lies about his age, joins up with militants heading for the island to set up camp in protest, daring the Navy to bomb them. Hernando! Where was I? How did you slip away? Anchoring their boat in deep waters, swimming for shore, something dragged him down . . .
Now she sobs in the dark, remembering. She was dozing peacefully on her lānai, dreaming of Ta‘a Utu. Dreaming they could run away, leave it all behind. She remembers looking up. Rachel in a bright dress bringing her the news, a splashed palette moving through the leaves. She remembers her cells jostling each other, absorbing what Rachel is trying to say. In that moment they stepped out of time and entered a frame, a memory. That’s what always comes back to her, that moment, the sheer peace before the splash between the leaves.
. . . After that couldn’t talk to Rachel, couldn’t look at her. Let her pay for everything, like it was her fault. Memorial, lū’au, Hawaiian Nationalist spokesmen, several hundred people. Huge wreaths, endless ceremonies. Me screaming “Where is he? Where’s the body? Who is pulling my leg?” My marriage goes, lost to grief.
My skeleton alters, flesh lets go. Everything, even pubic hair turns white. Ming saying my body died for Hernando; what will regenerate is him reborn in me. What does she know, her vapid little life. She tries to preach that Buddhist crap—nothing is permanent, death is our natural condition. I bust her house up, throw furniture around, smash her Bach and Brahms . . .
. . . Flying to Ta‘a, his horror at my face, a mask hung shapeless from my skull. He holds this sack, instantly old. He penetrates this hag. Using him like it was his fault, too, using him to fuck my way back to life, to sanity, slowly taking back the colorations. My hair growing black again, metabolism speeding up, flesh tightening. Then my drowning shadow surfacing above me. Ta‘a’s daughter, Vanya, struck with polio. “God’s will,” he sobs. “Our penance.” Hernando gone, his daughter crippled. Me begging, “Give me another child.” And Ta‘a horrified, saying God will deliver us a freak. Now, he comes outside me, slowly kills me, lets go of me. One day, silently he walks away, leaves me screaming in a strange hotel, belly graffitied with dead sperm . . .
. . . the months, the years, humping myself into stupors with faceless men picked up in Auckland bars, beside airport carousels of locked leather. Slender Ethiopian, high buttocks like black tar. Korean drinking like an Irishman. Malaysian rubber king, brandy and Gitaines. An Indian with khas-smelling hair, impotent, describing cremation on the Ganges, “. . . mourners staying with the corpse until the head explodes.” He only wants to suck my breasts. I hit him with my fists. “I’m not a bloody cow.” Chaos, the meshing of my gears . . .
. . . Daring Pono, daring her to say one word. The stink of different nationalities on me. She’s too distracted, grieving for Hernando, having loved him unnacountably, his robustness, his huge, godlike size. “He remind her someone,” Run Run whispered. Her grief goes on and on, her looks so deadly, for three summers, Jess stays away. Jess and her mainland life, her own pale child, a daughter who betrayed her . . .
. . . Auwē! Our history . . . Tongueless women, eyes filled with ignorance of our own blood. I give Pono if-looks-could-kill stares, blame it all on her. What father was so
rotten she couldn’t tell our mothers who he was? And if she was a whore? If there were many fathers? TELL US! Too late for Jess’s mother, dead, Rachel’s disappeared. Ming’s mama and mine, too damaged to care . . . and us, all those summers, little girls looking sideways for identity. Now grown women whose history rots beneath the layers of our skin . . .
. . . And in my rotting, meeting Simon Weir. I should have hawked and spat, walked away. His lips stretched tight, measuring the chances he would take with me. Eyes, intense blueness of burnt blades. Him circling me, my pulse fast, I can’t wait to hate him. Outside that shabby hotel, flying foxes sleeping upside down in their own filth. Inside, creaking infinity of warped floorboards, ratty bed, oxidizing springs, insects immolating themselves in the Rid-Ray. The place perfect. Combustible. Then he is in me, and he is nothing to me, a way to pass time between grief and grief. And what is left for me, but mourning. Whoring. Lust a lunatic grinning through a crowd.
She throws her arms out in the dark, and there is nothing.
. . . Hernando! I stand sonless all my days . . .
Ming
* * *
SHE WAKES, HER MOUTH SO VERY SOUR. She can feel the wolf approaching, her joints beginning to ache. Unless she can outrun it. Try. She lights another pipe, and counts back slowly, years of terrible fevers, arthritis, bone-weary fatigue. Hair loss, mouth sores, a crackling in the heart and lungs. And always, the butterfly rash across her nose and cheeks—a wolfs facial markings.
. . . One day they say my heart will Jail. Or kidneys. System-ic lu-pus er-y-them-a-to-sus, enunciated slowly, like a mantra. Sometimes the wolf retreats, and I betray him with good health. The wrath when he returns. Dermatologists, rheumatologists, immunologists, their silly therapies—corticosteroids, antimalarials, immunosuppressants. Untamed, he comes and goes, my wolf. He is my sentence, the heavy bars before me. But I have something that unlocks those bars. He attacks, I deceive. How we abuse each other . . .
Shark Dialogues Page 24