. . . Have I ever really left this place? Even when I leave I take it with me. In younger years, thinking Pono hated me. What she hated was my pre-life, what my mother did, marrying my father. Strange . . . I have no photograph of them together. Tonight, Pono staring at me as if she’d never seen me before. As if she has to learn me, after only three years. Sometimes in New York, I think I’ve imagined her. They’re all a dream slipped sideways into my sleep. I wake terrified, bereft . . .
She slides off boots, pulls a framed snapshot from her duffel, a picture of her mother, Emma. Sometimes when she looks at her, Jess imagines she is now her mother waking from a coma, journeying out of a long intrusive sleep back to memory chains, to life, real life. The world racing just outside her skin.
. . . Seven, eight years old the first time Mother put me on that plane. So young I didn’t know where I was going. Mother sobbing. Father holding her. How she must have wanted to come home, was dying to, something in her already dying. Her telling me I had to know my cousins, all the family I would ever have. Arriving terrified. So pale, so different from the others. One night, so desperate, so alone, crawling into Pono’s bed, thinking she would kill me, devour me. Finding Rachel there, and Vanya, Ming. We were all terrified!. . .
. . . That huge bed where we slept against this snoring mountain. At first she just lay there, staring, like we were small pets she had to keep alive. Then drawing us to her large, warm breasts rising and falling, and us falling asleep, her heart thrumming against our heads, our lashes tangled in her hair. Tūtū . . . Her scent oceanic, salty, ambrosial—seaweed, jasmine, wild plum. Her arms drawing us together. Little limbs entwined, shy hands creeping towards each other. In sleep, Vanya’s brown arm thrown across my waist, feeling her breath, her pulse, the vital current. Me, whispering the word, trying to comprehend it. Cousin. And dreaming, turning, shifting, like small birds in formation. Summer unto summer, growing accustomed to our different hues, different temperaments. Less gaps and lapses. Trust. Finally, love . . .
. . . Primitive draw of Run Run’s kitchen, like fires in caves in the age when reptiles flew. Smells, grease, her snaggletoothed laughter, sucking mango seed while she hacked at fish, pigs, chickens, place looking like a cannibal’s back yard. On the radio, Alfred Apaka, Hilo Hattie, “Hawai‘i Calls,” happy-sad Hawaiian songs. “Beyond the Reef,” “Hanalai Bay.” Four girls begging, “Tell us about our mothers! Are we like them? Were they smart and pretty?” Run Run seemed to hold so many keys. Our disappointment when she said, “I didn’t know yoah mamas till dey was mamas too, bring you here foah meet yoah cuz, Rachel . . . ’Cept foah you!” Run Run pointing at me. “I dere de day yoah mama bring home haole; say dey goin’ marry. Auwē .’ She shoah one reckless, brave wahine!”...
. . . After that, I began to think of my father as heroic. Marrying a reckless woman seemed such a daring thing. The life they lived, improvisation, drift, trying to fabricate some normalcy for me . . . Tonight, sitting near Pono on the sofa, skidding toward her along the slope created by her weight, I wanted to grab her and tell her “They were happy! I remember laughter!” . . . Mother going darker with the years, tea-colored, beautiful, hair black, electric. Father pale, blond, rangy in build, ethos of American Gothic in his long handsome face. A principled irony in the eyes . . .
Jess places her mother’s picture on a table, remembering her father, Vernon, growing ill. Learning to know him in a new silent form, face haggard, hair straggly like an aged revolutionary, hands grotesquely bloated, weeping sores, like rotting catcher’s mitts. Months, years passing with the rise and fall of blood count, blood pressure, temperature. Radiation traveling him like a slow-paced virus. The hideous mouthpiece made of gold foil, so his inlays would stop radiating killer rays into his jawbone. With the mouthpiece, he became a monster.
She wonders why doctors bothered, so obvious he was dying. When he coughed, red lumps on white linen. Now she thinks of her handsome father dead of four types of cancer, and leukemia, in Bethesda Naval Hospital. She remembers doctors calling him heroic, and wonders if a man can be heroic for dying unintentionally. A man who, as a U.S. Navy sailor four decades earlier, had swept the decks of radiated battleships during Bomb testings in the Marshalls.
. . . Mother drifting when he died, across oceans, into other hemispheres. To stop would have invalidated the penance she imposed on herself. Placeless woman, with no clan, drifting to confirm her placelessness. Then dying in the desert, all alone . . . Me traveling there to claim her ashes, longest, loneliest journey of my life, from which I am still returning. Ming says each journey conceals another journey within, that not every journey can be mapped. What does she know, she’s never loved. Well, she has her secret; some secrets take the place of love. Maybe that’s why she and Pono understand each other . . .
In slow motion Jess removes her clothes, pulls a T-shirt from her duffel, pulls out other snapshots, her and her cousins waving from Pono’s truck, cowgirls of different colors headed for a rodeo, bodies still sweet-scented, hairless, breastless.
. . . Does childhood really happen? Do we imagine it? Everyone remembers something else. . . . Vanya saying I once packed my face with mud, trying to grow darker so she would love me. Brown, beautiful Vanya. Knowing exactly who she was. Yet there were times I’d catch her staring at my pale skin with a sort of. . . thirst. Each of us wanting something of the other. Sometimes in dreams becoming the other . . . Run Run saying we’re all one thing, the sum of Pono . . .
. . . Anna said the same thing when she came that awful summer. Said we four cousins were like a drop of mercury, one splash shivering in clones. Scooped together we became one drop again, no seams, no shatter marks. Cold, clinical Anna, who seemed to burst from my womb with already formed opinions. . . . Bringing her here at sixteen. Introducing Pono, Run Run, Vanya, Rachel, Ming. HERE IS MY SKIN. THIS IS WHO I AM. Her diffidence, polite disdain. (Palomino hair, cold cream skin. So much like her father, so very much his child.) Her shock, her accusations, “You didn’t tell me they were dark!” Summer of our fracturing. And when Benson and I divorced, Anna choosing to go with him. Tearing down genetic blocks, erasing my side of her history . . .
. . . Anna, now in pre-med, wanting to be a surgeon-of-the-open-heart-and-transplant-kind. Real medicine, she says, as opposed to what I do. Anna, who doesn’t tell her Duke U. friends her mother is part native. Her friends would call Pono and Vanya “darkies.” What would they call Ming and Rachel? “Slant-eyes?” . . . Marrying Benson, a Southerner, perhaps a way of resurrecting my father. Rewrite the script, make it work this time. Daddy, Daddy, I didn’t know. Incessant bleat of what we learn too late. Of what he dared in marrying my mother, taking her home to Alabama . . .
. . . Imagining him at the front door of his father’s house, puffing his chest out, grinning and proud. He puts his arm around my mother, rings the bell. (Didn’t he know what was coming?) They’re all assembled inside. Maybe there’s a cake, candles lit. WELCOME HOME THE HERO FROM THE WAR. Maybe someone sits at a piano, fingers poised above the keys. A window curtain twitches. My father rings and rings but no one ever answers. Finally, he and my mother leave . . .
. . . The early fifties, Americans still weren’t sure what Hawaiians were. Maybe my father’s folks thought they were like Nebraskans, or Canadians, white folks from far away. Until someone inside the house looked out. Mother wasn’t that dark, but she was never white . . . What’s always evoked here for me, not my father’s shame, not my mother’s humiliation, not even the silence after he rings the bell. What’s evoked, always . . . the twitching of that curtain. They never went south again, never returned to Hawai‘i, both banished from their tribes. O Mother, I saw your differentness, people calling you exotic, what they call those they tend to stare at . . .
Jess pours another shot of Rémy. How pale her hands are on the glass! She swallows, shivers, fire flowers in her gut. She sits back remembering a solitary childhood. Talking to trees, a blade of grass, insects captured in her palm. Her
first summers in Kona, hiding on beaches, under hau trees whispering to geckos, mongoose, trying to explain her situation. Hapa. Mix-blood. Half brown. Half white. Which was really her? Hugging small living things, chattering to them, trying to clear up the confusion, the ravel of her being.
. . . And still preferring animals to humans, mostly. Their patience, quiet valor in the face of death. The way they let me be. Poor Benson, thinking he was marrying a clever woman, that I became a veterinarian surgeon for the money. Thinking we would be a team, high-profile lawyer and his wife the social vet. Until he understood my thing with animals. My need . . .
. . . Had I been darker, not yellow, caramel, gold, but rich, dark brown, I would have lived different. Married different. Walked out in the world. Mars says I’ve lived in silence: the mixed-blood anthem. Yet, all four of us are mix-blood. Why does Pono treat me differently? “You white,” Run Run says. “Skin dat stole Hawai‘i, took away our land, our queen. Also somet’ing in yoah tūtū’s past. Make her hate haole real bad.” “Tell me,” I beg her. She shakes her head. “Some t’ings best forgotten.” And wanting to run to Pono, hold her, share secrets, mutilations. Tell me yours, I will tell you mine . . .
* * *
. . . Me in stirrups, arms, legs strapped and buckled down . . . $1,000 prepaid to this doctor who will scrape out a mistake, seed planted in the throes of dying marriage. Needle in my arm, a sedative, then this doctor unzipping his pants, ugly, pink root waving and erect. Turning like a giant screw inside me. Rolling Stones full volume while I scream . . . Forcing Valium down my throat. Screams sighing into little bleats. His tongue insistent in my ear, telling me he’s coming . . . coming. Then zipping up his pants. Hairy hands all business now, scraping, scraping out his sperm, my blood, departed husband’s seed. And me, so new at this, thinking this is part of an abortion. They get to do this to you . . .
. . . Calling Vanya in Chicago, telling her, and telling her. Her voice turning lethal like a box of knives. Vanya flying east. I have to fight her, wrestle her, to keep her from burning down the doctor’s house. Greasy pigment, smell of paint, painting under moonlight while the doctor slept. Next morning huge letters across his manicured green lawn. RAPIST. And how the word kept reappearing on his lawn, other women, other victims down the years. Women picketing his house, his office. Lawsuits, indictments. The man convicted, sentenced, put away. I never testify, carrying that rage for years. What happened to it? Maybe it became the dead husk of my marriage . . .
Jess rises now, circles the room, walks her hands along the walls, spreading her fingers, imagining them imprinted on ancient fingerprints. She wondered whose lives had been lived in that room, that house. How long ago? In what time? What is long, and what is time?
. . . Time, the thing we wave our dreams at, the way people in horror movies scare off vampires with crosses. Time, the thing we can’t beat back . . . Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. That’s what Vanya told me after my divorce . . . What I reminded her when her boy died . . . Hernando! And all I had were words. “I would give my life to bring him back.” I would have done it in a minute. Not knowing how much I loved Vanya until we lost her that year. A cadaver, skin of ash, hair ghostly white. Eyes gone red, an awful red . . .
. . . Staying with her in Honolulu, afraid she’d kill herself alone. Flying her to Auckland to her lover, Ta‘a Utu. And hearing them through that hotel wall . . . Vanya begging him for a child. Begging him to fuck her to death, to death, and meaning it. Me listening through the wall, their morbid, frenzied socketing . . . What Hernando’s dying did, what it took from us . . . Run Run crazed, squatting in the kitchen waving her carving knife at God. And Pono full of sobbing rages, tearing everything apart. Plantation languishing, coffee harvest lost that year . . . Pono pointing her rage at each of us. At me. And so I ran, putting three years between us . . .
. . . Maybe time doesn’t heal. Maybe it doesn’t even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred. Mings’s letters arriving in New York, then Rachel’s, even Run Run’s, all saying the same thing . . . as if I wouldn’t believe it from just one of them. Each letter corroborating the other two: Pono, the plantation, slowly reviving . . . Time I come back home. But Pono never writing me, never answering my letters. Not once in all my life . . . Sometimes her deep voice on the phone long-distance. Summoning. That deadliness that left our mothers frozen forever in roles of injured adolescents. Pono an obstacle they couldn’t destroy, so they destroyed themselves instead . . .
. . . Now what will happen if she dies. Never made my peace with her. Or maybe it’s made each time she calls me home. I come running, stand here with my luggage, a dog begging with its bowl. Pono greeting me with that look that shaves my spine. Hapa-haole. Half as good as the others. The message massed beneath her gaze, surrounding me like weather . . .
. . . Tonight her fierce, brown face in profile, my mother’s more delicate profile layered, magnified. Then something new, she turned to me, studied me, took my hand and tapped it. Secret Morse of genealogy. Run Run says she wants me to come home. The wonder of it!. . . Later, Rachel saying something closer to truth. “She’s growing old. Afraid she can’t count on Ming and me. You and Vanya would know how to handle people, keep the farm going” . . .
. . . Vanya laughing. “Keep it going? Like to sell this termite palace, these acres of silly coffee trees. Donate the proceeds to Pūnana Leo, teach our kids their Mother Tongue.” Vanya turning to me. “Anyway, Jess, you should come home. What kind of life is that, your daughter gone, spending your days and nights with broken animals”. . . Not all days, Vanya, not all nights . . .
Jess slides another snapshot from her bag, a tense, rather handsome man in reading glasses. Dark, smooth Afro skin, short-cropped Afro hair, aggressive posture, almost a leaning forward, as if he had important things to tell and not much time. Intensity in the eyes, eyes that have seen too much, know too much, know it is too late. Mars, shaking his life at her like a brilliant bracelet, a lightning rod, a gourd. A life prodigiously brutal, shocking, and full of poetry and dreams. Mars, telling her his life would knock her down, telling her to go back to her blood, her people.
. . . It’s not that simple, Mars. Sometimes blood can be so cruel, so damaging. And yet, what other road is there, except the one that leads us back. But, what is here . . . Ming frail, racked by that disease. Rachel shackled to her husband. Vanya lost. And me, still the haole, tapping on the pane. Life is wearing down our edges, our defenses . . . Even Pono wearing down. I see hesitations, hints of frailty, a life of loss—daughters, grandson—God only knows what else. O if we could just forget. Maybe a little oblivion is what is needed to get by . . .
. . . That’s what Toru said tonight, riding up through coffee fields, phantom of my youth. Seeing him, I wept! Talking of our lives, me going off to college, him going off to ‘Nam. . . . Then a decade of his life lost to smack, living in the dregs of Honolulu. Now a man who negotiates each day with caution. Thicker, muscular, paniolo smell of pastures, horse sweat, cattle. Smell of mountains, magic, our youth. Beloved Toru! How we learned to trust him with our lives . . . Climbing thirty-foot palm trees swaying over cliffs, diving blind into deep rock quarries. Swimming into coves of sleeping sharks. Running over lava still seething just beneath the surface. He could have led us through fire. He was everything we knew, everything we trusted . . .
. . . And when we thought he’d died in ’Nam, when he was MIA, how each of us held him in our memory, breathing life into him, praying, talking to his snapshots. Pono out there in the sea chanting, begging‘aumākua. “Let my grandson live!” And he remembered us. Under triple canopy, watching his shattered foot sizzle and shimmer with maggots, thinking he would lose it, lose his mind. “I had deep memories of each of you.” he said. “That’s what kept me going. I was the repository of your lives . . .”
Jess sighs, looks at the snapshots aligned on her table. Feeling the weight an
d moment of blood, history, this house. So much converging here. Maybe this is their last refuge, what keeps them all from madness. Maybe this will be the genesis of their madness. Maybe they will eat each other’s corpses. She dozes in the chair, knowing she is cheating, she hasn’t yet stepped out on the lānai. Living in New York she has lost touch with nature, the elements, has become forgetful, almost ignorant, of them. Now she knows the moon is just outside, looming and actual. And the sea, she hears the sea. And the silver, humming land. She is suddenly fatigued, knowing the island will engulf her, she will lose perspective, she will be beseiged. She throws herself across the bed, plunges into sleep.
. . . Let it attend, it has always attended.
Toru
* * *
HE HAS WAITED FOR YEARS. Trained himself to wait. He has worked, slept, communed with other humans, but something in him sat apart, day after day, year after year, like a sniper, a roadside mendicant. He has waited for their return, all of them, for they are his key to the past, antiphonal and staggered youth. They are the landscape that fills in his blanks so he is more than just a man who’s lost his edge.
Now he drives past haole tourists in linen shorts and nipple-bottomed shoes, girl-hipped men swinging golf irons. He sacrificed his youth so soft, favored men like these could spend their lives sinking graceful putts into rich, landscaped Bermuda grass. Toru gazes out at them with almost a sense of affection. When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.
His jet-black hair, once braided down his back in filthy rawhide, is short, almost a municipal cut. His Asian face is handsome, almond eyes darting like quick fishes. But the crazy sizzle—the glittering, snapping, sightless gaze—of his drug years is gone. Now, his gaze is steady, dense as silt. At forty, here is a man whose body is lean and ready, legs slightly bowed, but built for endurance, long distances. Tall for a Japanese, his skin is tan, paniolo tan, except for the shrapnel scars—ruffles of gray fading to bad industrial brown on his back, gut, forearms.
Shark Dialogues Page 27