by T W Neal
Bonny and Nicole drop out, but I’m determined to continue. I enjoy hula—like ballet, it’s a physical challenge, and I like physical challenges. I like the percussion of the ipu, the rhythm of the chant, the good feeling I get when we are all coordinated as a group.
After class one day, Kumu puts her hand on my shoulder and tells Mom, “Toby’s picking it up really well. She’s got a feel for it, and she works hard.”
Mom knows it has been difficult socially. She says cautiously, “Toby doesn’t feel like the other girls accept her.”
I want to look down and hide, but make myself look at Kumu. I need to know if she thinks the hassling from the other girls is okay.
Kumu’s expressive black brows come down in a fierce frown. I like watching her mobile, golden-skinned face with its wide nose and fine-cut, plump lips. You always know exactly what she’s thinking, and I like that. “Who stay giving you trouble?” she asks me.
Complaining about the bullying is being a rat and only makes it worse. “The nail that sticks up gets pounded down,” Mrs. Harada says in my mind. “Keep your head down and don’t draw attention to yourself, and maybe they’ll forget we’re here.” Pop’s version.
I’m still trying to make that approach work. “Nobody, Kumu. It’s okay.”
“You tell me if anyone gives you hard time. I want you to keep dancing,” Kumu says. I’d do anything to make her smile like she does, looking at me.
A few weeks later, we stay late rehearsing one day for our first performance. I help Kumu pick up the hall, offering to sweep the stage for her. Kira has been calling me “suck-up” and “brownnoser”, but the closer I stay to Kumu, the less likely I am to get pinched.
After Kumu locks up the building and gets in her rusty old pickup, I fetch my bike and push it across the grass in front of the beautiful green church next to the hall.
Kira and a group of kids from school come out from where they’ve been waiting for me, out of sight behind the building. When locals come for you, there’s never just one out to beat your ass. They call it “mobbing,” and they do it in a group because it works.
“Fucking haole crap, I told you to go home.” Kira’s swinging a spider lily bulb the size of a grapefruit, ripped out from the ground beside the church. She has two boys with her and two girls from hula class. I know every one of them, and how much they hate me for the color of my skin.
I jump on my bike and try to blast out of there, but they grab me before I can get up speed on the grass. They knock me off the bike. Everything is a blur of hitting with lily bulbs, hair pulling, punching, and kicking. I’m curled in a ball on the ground with my arms around my head, waiting to die, when they finally finish with me.
“Now you get the message, Haole Crap?” Kira says. “Don’t come here again.”
They jog away, high-fiving and laughing.
I lie there until the coast is clear, then get up slowly. I’m aching all over, covered with soil from the roots of the bulbs. I spit dirt out of my mouth, and it’s ground into my hair. Even my nose is filled with dirt, and every inch of my body feels bruised. My scalp stings from losing chunks of hair. I get up, wobbling and staggering. I jump on my bike with a burst of adrenaline. Pedaling through town, tears I couldn’t cry during the attack pour down my cheeks.
Mom renders first aid, puts me in a bath and to bed. I even get two pink baby aspirin, a rare treat for pain. She calls Kumu on the old rotary phone, and of course Kumu wants the names of the kids.
I won’t give them up. Kira’s hatred will spread even further if I tell. Being haole is my crime and my punishment.
I refuse to go back to hula. I refuse to go back to school. I get hysterical every time they tell me I have to go, running away into the pasture and climbing up into the trees where Mom and Pop can’t reach me. I don’t feel safe anywhere alone. I have bad dreams about tidal waves almost nightly and keep ending up in bed with Bonny, like when I was a little kid.
The only time I really feel good is riding Keiki, and he’s my constant companion.
Mom eventually caves. She orders another set of Calvert curriculum and pulls me out of public school, telling Mr. Beck it’s because of the bullying. Now Bonny and I are back to the routine we had in Wainiha—lessons in the morning followed by work hours, followed by free time.
Calvert is actually a lot harder than the work I was doing at Hanalei School, with Latin, pre-algebra, and composition writing added on to the normal subjects.
With a little help from Pop, Bonny and I build a tree fort out in the pasture in one of the ironwood trees. It’s an old door resting on the branches, just a platform really, but up in the tree with its hidden handholds to climb into, I feel safer. I go there often, by myself, with a pillow and a book. Reading continues to be my best escape, a magic carpet of adventure ready to take me away any time I open those big stiff covers with their delightful musty library smell.
During our free time, Bonny and I invent elaborate games with make-believe characters, dressing up and speaking in accents. I get so good at riding Keiki that I can ride him without a saddle or bridle. My favorite game is being an Indian brave and chasing and shooting homemade arrows at Bonny, the hapless white settler, from Keiki’s back.
Bonny and I are together too much, and I’m mean to her. I don’t know why. She’s my only real friend, but I pinch the back of her arms and cheat her out of Gigi gifts with bad trades, since I know the value of things better than she does at only seven. I don’t know why I do it; I hate that I do it—and I can’t seem to stop.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Hokule`a
Christmas family picture with Sarah the goat at the Estate
Age: 11, The Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1976
The Hokule`a, an authentic sixty-foot replica of an ancient double-hulled sailing canoe, is crewed by Hawaiians replicating the migration to Hawaii from Polynesia without anything but star navigation. It’s a historic day when the sailing canoe lands in Hanalei Bay.
Our family, along with half the town, crowd along the old pier in the middle of the Bay as the huge canoe with its triangle sails makes its way slowly to tie up. A conch blows, greeting the vessel. Eager hands catch the ropes and pull the huge canoe in to the pier, securing it, as a kahu priest chants a pule prayer of blessing and greeting. The crew comes up onto the pier to applause, hugs, and greetings, and mounds of ginger, plumeria, and ti leaf lei.
We hang back and watch, proper etiquette for haole outsiders. We can’t press in through all the locals and Hawaiians in the middle of such an important cultural event. Pop keeps his hands on our shoulders, and the warmth and strength in them feels reassuring. We may not be able to go greet the crew, but we’re here, too stubborn to leave.
When the crew, dressed in traditional garb of malo and kihei, are properly buried under lei, the performances begin. Several halau chant and dance in the ancient style, stomping, whirling, and chanting in Hawaiian.
The sun’s hot, beating down on our heads, and I can feel my perpetually sunburned nose crisping yet again. Finally, it’s time to go to the park for a potluck luau under the ironwood trees.
The park’s picnic tables groan with traditional Hawaiian food: kalua pig baked in an underground imu oven, succulent laulau wrapped in kalo leaves, lomi lomi salmon mixed with chopped tomatoes and onions, vats of rice, tubs of poi, bowls of opihi, teriyaki chicken, salty limu salad made of edible seaweed, guava sponge cake, lilikoi meringue pie, and delicious coconut haupia pudding.
Mom has brought a dish to share, too—a great big won bok and mixed vegetable salad, grown in her garden, with soy sauce and sesame seed dressing.
Standing in the food line, with my cardboard luau plate with the square sections, the chatter of pidgin, delicious smells, and music of ukuleles filling the air, beer flowing and everyone cheerful, I enjoy a feeling of belonging. I haven’t really had that feeling since the days after the Wainiha flood. I’ve been a witness to something that will be remembered in song, dance, and l
iterature for years to come.
We’re too shy to approach the crew at the welcome event, but the next day the canoe has been moved, anchored inside the calm waters of Hanalei River’s mouth. Mom makes a huge plate of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, rich with butter and brown sugar, and sends Bonny and me to the river to give them to the crew.
We’re feeling still shy, but the burly Hawaiian guy on deck when we arrive grins big. “Come check her out, kids!”
Encouraged, I hand up the cookies to him. “My mom baked these for you folks. She said to tell you they’re from our family.” Mom made me repeat to her that I was saying they were from our family, the nuance there being that we’re haole, but that we want to honor the Hokule`a too. “She said to tell you we’re very proud to see you on your journey.”
“Thanks! The cookies look so ono!” The crewman takes the cookies and gives me a hand up the rope ladder onto one of the hulls, Bonny ascending close behind.
The canoe is being used as a floating teaching school about the Hawaiians’ means of travel and navigation, and I’m impressed with its size until I look at the living area, a tiny shelter that’s dauntingly small for a crew of more than ten members. Everything is tidy and stowed, and there isn’t a nail or bolt anywhere—the entire craft is held together with six miles of rope lashings.
On the way back to the Estate, less than a block away from the Hanalei River, Bonny and I skip and jump with excitement that we gave something from our family to that pioneering crew. Our bare haole feet touched Hokule`a’s historic wooden deck, and we felt welcome.
Chapter Twenty-Six
An Epic Battle
Me, Mom, and her giant homegrown cabbage
Age: 11, The Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1976
Our world gets smaller and stranger as Mom and Pop drink and smoke more, hoard more supplies, and invent rules and rituals for the family as we withdraw more and more. I’ve seen enough by now to realize it’s happening, but I can’t do anything because I’m trapped in the bubble of safety that is life at the Kauikeolani Estate.
Mom budgets severely. I think it’s because Pop’s drinking so much beer that he’s using up the food budget. We eat a lot of veggies from the garden, beans and rice combined as a protein, and drink Brewer’s Yeast for nutrition. Mom mixes a tablespoonful into water for each of us in a mug. The yeast is the color of deli mustard, has a mealy texture, and tastes like raw mushrooms. Breakfast is a shake made with papaya and bran mixed together “for digestion.” The papaya shakes thicken very quickly to a pudding texture if not drunk right away, and I hate the texture. One day I end up sitting at the table with a shake in front of me for an hour because it has thickened and I can’t drink it. I’m not allowed to leave the table until it’s gone, and eventually I get it down, gagging all the way.
“I’m glad you’re away from that germ factory,” Mom says, referring to Hanalei School. Getting sick in our family is no fun. If we’re sick, in order not to pass germs along, we get an individual set of dishes to use, are isolated to our rooms, and given fruit and water to eat for the duration. I understand why but it feels like punishment, and both Bonny and I try to hide any symptoms of being sick for as long as possible.
Worst of all are Mom’s health “colonics.” She administers weekly enemas using a big red rubber hot water bottle and a white tube with a nozzle inserted into the rectum. “Did you know that the average person has five pounds of undigested meat rotting in their intestines?” she says, with that gleam in her eye that reminds me of the crazy. How could we have meat in our bowels when we don’t eat any? Still, she insists the colonics are good for us and will keep us healthy.
We lie on the bathroom floor on a towel with the enema bag hanging on a hook on the wall, gravity-feeding water and an herbal mixture into our innards. My sphincter never learns to relax, and I hate the bizarre full feeling and the frenzy to reach the toilet in time in order to spew it all back out.
I think it’s gross and weird, and I try to refuse. I end up getting so many wheelbarrows of cow manure and work hours as a consequence that I cave and go along with it. My mouth continues to get me into trouble—but I just can’t see colonics as “normal.” And I badly want to be normal.
Bonny and I bicker more and more now that we’re thrown together so much. Everything she does irritates me, even though I know she’s not trying to. She’s still prettier and sweeter than me. Mom and Pop and the kids at school like her better. It’s never been fair that way.
We still play Barbies with elaborate societal and dramatic rules. In an abandoned garden patch next to the house, we build a city for the Barbies, with roads, houses, and Breyer horses to ride. One day, feeling powerfully evil, I tie her favorite Barbie to a stake.
“Poor blonde settler woman. She’s been taken captive.” I’m continuing our drama in the pasture with the Barbies. “And now she’s being sacrificed.”
“No! Stop! No!” Bonny cries. Her eyes well up and she sobs as I pile sticks around Barbie’s feet and light them with a wooden match from the big red box Pop keeps by the stove. The doll melts gruesomely, and the plastic stinks as it burns. I check to make sure Mom and Pop are nowhere around. Bonny smears the tears away and scowls. “I’ll get you for this.”
“I’d like to see you try.” I’m still a little bigger, but she’s a tall eight-year-old with long legs that promise a height that I won’t have. I walk off and leave her there crying as she pours water on her melted Barbie.
Something in me feels a vicious satisfaction but shame, too, like I ate something bad, and the feeling churns in my stomach. I hate all the feelings I’m having. Some part of me knows how wrong it is to hurt my sister like this, but I can’t seem to stop myself.
I go into my bedroom and escape into the Black Stallion series, which I’m rereading. As usual it instantly takes me to somewhere better. I lean alongside the Black’s straining neck as he gallops across the desert. I am Alec.
Bonny comes into my room. She’s carrying a big, round rock the size of a breadfruit that Mom brought home from the beach. She hoists it overhead.
“I’m going to smash your face.” Bonny’s deadly serious. Her blue-and-yellow eyes blaze. Her arms tremble with the strain of holding up the huge, heavy rock.
I sit up on my bed. I’m only a little nervous. “You wouldn’t dare.”
She steps closer. “I’m going to.”
“Yeah, right.”
She heaves the rock. It hits me square in the face and knocks me off the bed, stunned, my glasses bent, my forehead bruised.
I’m totally shocked that she actually did it.
I come roaring up off the floor like a berserker and chase her through the house. We make it all the way outside. Next to the compost pile I catch her around the waist. I throw her down on the ground, and it’s a frenzy of hitting, kicking, hairpulling, biting, with us rolling in the dirt.
Somehow Bonny ends up on top, sitting on my chest. She wrenches my glasses off my face and holds them aloft.
“I’ll break them,” she threatens.
“Not the glasses! Not the glasses!”
They’re the nice, gold-framed glasses Gigi bought me from the specialist in California. If they break, I’ll have to go back to the purple plastic stop signs I had from Welfare.
“You stop being mean to me!” she yells, spit flying.
“Okay! Just give me the glasses.” She hands them back. I put them on, panting with fright at almost losing my precious specs.
“Don’t mess with my Barbies.” Bonny is still sitting on me. “And I’m not being the settler woman anymore.”
“Fine.”
She gets off me and we both stand up. We go back in the house and help each other clean up in the bathroom with peroxide and bacitracin. I crack a few cubes of ice from the aluminum ice tray and put them in a paper towel, holding the ice to my swollen forehead. “I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” I say. It’s a frequent mini-conversation.
“Fine.”
Sh
e’s bested me physically, and it marks a turning point. I stop treating Bonny badly because she’s going to hurt me if I do. I suspect, somewhere dark and half-known, that I’ve been acting out on her all the tortures done to me. Every time that thought tries to bubble up, I deflect it with something happier I’d like to imagine.
I’m good at not knowing things I don’t want to know—like what is happening in the cottage behind us when the couple who’ve moved in back there scream at each other.
I can hear the sound of the man hitting his wife and her cries of pain and fright, but I shut my ears, wrapping a pillow around my head, and open a book. I pretend everything’s okay until it is. The next day, I see the neighbor woman, limping and bruised. She smiles with her distorted mouth and says “Hi,” and I wonder how she got hurt.
When I read, there’s nothing going on for me but the story. Reading is a feeling like diving into warm water and staying under for as long as I possibly can. I savor the feeling of anticipation when I’ve got a new book from a favorite author, like Anne McCaffrey with her intelligent spaceships and tiny, friendly dragons. Adjusting my glasses and leaning close, a pillow rolled up under my arm, I open the book and submerge. The horror, grief, pain, and rage of people on the page are much more tolerable than any around me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Good Guru is Hard to Find
Age: 11, The Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, and SRF Compound, La Jolla, California, 1976
Mom and Pop are still seeking a religious trip that really resonates with them. So far, Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings have stuck the longest, but the Krishnas have been visiting and evangelizing in Hanalei in their orange robes and marigolds. A family we’re friends with, the Bryans, get involved. The Krishnas are building a temple outside Kapa`a, and the Bryan family invites us to a “love feast.” I still feel a special fondness for Vinnie Bryan for rescuing Bonny so long ago, and I remember having fun with Kenny.