by T W Neal
Eventually, we get used to being the Hmongs’ evening entertainment. Even after we’ve been living there for months, they gather around the window outside to watch us, and wave and smile every time we look up.
Things seem to settle during the next few months. With the Hmong surrounding us, our poverty feels like wealth as we hear them scream, fight, fart, and have sex on the other side of our wall and across the narrow driveway. During the day, the women wash laundry in their bathtubs inside, then hang it on lines crisscrossing the concrete driveway. They tote their babies, and cook up pots of strange-smelling stew. The men sit around on their haunches on the stoops, smoking and gossiping in a tongue that reminds me of mynah birds “talking story.”
Mom makes friends with one of the Hmong women, Myxie, who speaks some English. Myxie begins sewing a baby carrier for our coming brother or sister in the Hmong tradition, a lengthy project: two square panels, elaborately embroidered and quilted, with long red sashes that go over the shoulders and around the waist to anchor the baby against front or back. It’s so elaborate that I wonder if it will be ready in time as Mom’s pregnancy progresses, but she seems to enjoy working on it and coming over to show it to Mom.
I buy a bike at a garage sale and begin riding to school. In spite of arriving hot and sweaty, as it’s mostly uphill, biking keeps me in shape and helps me relax. I notice and record in my journal that I need to exercise every day, or I get edgy and emotional. I’m trying hard to be positive these days and keep my stress under control—all part of passing for normal.
I qualify for free lunch but make my lunch at home so I don’t have to get in the free line. My home-packed lunches are cold corn bread and an apple, or a cottage cheese sandwich, which Mom says is “perfectly nutritious” but has the disadvantage of being strange and soggy.
“What kind of sandwich is that?” Dawn asks one day at lunch, pointing to the wheat bread from the day-old bakery oozing cottage cheese and Mom’s homegrown alfalfa sprouts.
“Low calorie.” I take a big bite, eyeing her down.
“Okay,” Dawn says doubtfully. I forgot to eat the squishy mess in secret in the bathroom stall. People will accept any kind of food oddity if counting calories is a part of it—and I’m becoming increasingly worried about my weight as I mature into a body that doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
I want to be slim and hard-bodied with small boobs. Instead, I’ve got an hourglass shape. I begin to get attention from guys, whistles as I zoom by on my bike—and I’m nervous at the unwanted notice, remembering the pig hunters and their truck.
Act normal ‘til it is normal is my new motto. Staying away from overcrowded, not-normal home as much as possible, I join the soccer team and run around every day after school for practice, or study after school at the library—but I eventually have to get on my bike and ride back to my claustrophobic home. There’s no privacy to be had anywhere, and I need somewhere to retreat to.
I take the screen out of our bedroom window, which looks into a six-foot gap between our building and the next. The Hmong are using this hidden strip of ground for growing giant red opium poppies, florid as a Georgia O’Keefe painting. I climb out the window, looking at the poppies to see if the tiny cuts they make in the poppy pods are bleeding more of the black sap they’ll make into hash. I’ve read about opium harvesting and I want to see them do it—but I never catch anyone back there.
Standing on the windowsill, I turn around and pull myself up onto the flat, tar paper-covered roof. I look across the houses from above and watch the sunsets alone. On non-school days, I go up and lie on a towel with my book and pillow, listening to a tiny portable radio and reading, or writing in my journal in the evenings until the stars come out. It’s almost as good as my old tree fort at the Estate in Hanalei, another lifetime ago.
Bonny and I still get along well. She’s reconnected with her best friend, Kim, from when we lived in the area before and is enjoying fifth grade. On weekends, Bonny and I ride our bikes all around the town, exploring. We spot crayfish in the tiny park pond in the middle of town and, using bacon on a string, catch hundreds of them to boil at home and crack out of their shells.
The Hmong are also foraging—the ocean all around us is a marine sanctuary, but they clearly don’t know that as I see them passing by with bags loaded with clams, fish, sea urchins, even starfish, all destined for the soup pot. One day when I come up to my rooftop retreat, I’m confronted by the maggot-filled heads of deer they’ve shot and put up there to dry. They smell so bad and draw so many flies, I can’t go up on the roof for months.
Everything mortifies me these days, not the least of which is the embarrassing vastness of my pregnant mother. A pregnant woman wears a sign around her midsection proclaiming, I HAD SEX. And when the sign points to your dad, and you know about the gross activity that goes on to get pregnant, mortification is the only possible response.
Mom’s belly is a vast mountain that heaves and ripples with the powerful movements of the baby. Her hair is long, curling, and lustrous. Her flat breasts have filled, her nails are shiny. She exudes contentment as she waddles back and forth across the highway toting a red STOP sign for her crossing guard job at Bonny’s school, or squats to weed the garden she’s carved out of our postage stamp lawn.
I’m equal parts fascinated and repulsed by what’s happening to her. Mom shows us a photo-illustrated book on childbirth from the library, and the baby’s head “crowning” gives me nightmares. Getting a ten-pound baby out through that hole seems to defy all the laws of physics.
“You just forgot how big I was with Anita,” Mom pants as we take an evening walk as a family along the bluffs above a sunset-streaked Pacific Ocean, an evening ritual she and Pop usually do with four-year-old Anita. “I was huge with Anita. All of you were ten-pound babies, except you, Toby. You were only eight pounds.”
I lift my nose in the air, eyeballing Bonny with mock snootiness. “I’m the petite one.”
“More like a redheaded Oompa Loompa,” Bonny says, with a shove that makes me stagger. She has a quick wit that keeps everyone around her laughing. Her future beauty shines in the flash of her eyes and whirl of her creamy-thick blonde hair, though she’s still got the uneven teeth and chubbiness of almost-adolescence. Her legs are longer than mine, making her my height at only ten.
Anita, at four, is an elfin sprite. She’s shy and gorgeous, with pink cheeks, a beauty mark on the stem of her neck, and the same green eyes Bonny and Pop have. A little silver tabby cat, she ghosts quietly through our tiny apartment until she ends up in my lap and I’m brushing her dandelion-gilt hair yet again.
The trail of droplets dotting the dusty path behind Mom that evening turns out to be amniotic fluid, and her labor begins before we get back to the house. Mom and Pop grab her bag, and off they go to the hospital in the Pinto.
Bonny, Anita, and I play Parcheesi and read stories and go to bed together in the waterbed. I drag the phone out of the living room into our room so that when Pop calls I won’t miss it.
He doesn’t call until the next morning. “You have a sister—Wendy Ellen.” His voice sounds like change rattling in a rusty can. I’m so relieved that Mom and the baby are okay that I make pancakes for Bonny and Anita for breakfast.
I just knew there would never be another brother after Francis.
Mom and Wendy come home a few days later. Wendy’s adorable: blue-eyed, dark-haired, with a strong pair of lungs. We do a “photo shoot” with each of us holding her, posing with Mom’s hospital flowers.
Holding her, I fall in love again. There’s just nothing like a baby: that milky smell, the helpless sweetness of her weight in my arms. That I ever said what I did about her seems obscene now that she’s here.
Myxie, our Hmong neighbor, has finally finished the beautifully stitched baby sling, and Wendy spends her first months wrapped close to Mom, wailing her unhappiness into Mom’s breasts. Wendy’s colicky, not good news in our tiny apartment. Even the neighbors on the other sid
e, all twelve of them or so, are worried and stop by to ask after the baby as Wendy’s crying keeps everyone awake into the night.
Pop becomes withdrawn, and his black mood intensifies as Wendy wails on, inconsolable. Anita comes to sleep with Bonny and me, displaced as the baby of the family, but in typical Anita fashion, there’s no fuss or drama—she simply appears down by our feet or wedged between us.
Mom takes Wendy to the doctor. The baby comes home with both of her feet in casts. “Her feet are turned too far inward. The casts are going to help straighten them out,” Mom says. The casts do not improve Wendy’s outlook on the world.
Mom’s bubble of contentment has burst. Her thick hair falls out in handfuls. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and she stares into the distance, nursing or joggling Wendy. She’s barely keeping the crazy at bay.
I do what I can, helping fix meals, cleaning, and taking care of Anita after school. Bonny and I take her with us on her little bike with training wheels on long rides along the baked-dirt bluffs, or into town to shop or fish for crawdads. We harvest freakishly large vegetables from Mom’s garden that we trade at the health food store for tofu, free-range eggs, and Dr. Bronner’s that we can’t get at the discount stores where we often shop.
“Never seen tomatoes this big.” The health food store manager goggles over the cardboard boxes Bonny and I carry in balanced on our bike handlebars loaded with glossy eggplant, brain-sized broccoli, and tomatoes like small pumpkins. He holds one up, marveling, and weighs it. “Pound and a half. What’s the secret to these giant vegetables?”
“Horse manure.” Mom’s love of gardening with all things manure has not abated. The first thing she did after having us shake the dirt out of the dug-up grass of the former lawn of our minuscule yard was locate a stable. She then asked if we could haul away their manure, which they were happy about, and she volunteered us to shovel it into bags to keep the garden supplied.
We’re in Isla Vista for a year, and Wendy eventually grows out of her fussiness. I start tenth grade, and I’ve got a crush on a fellow soccer player, Philip, who lives in Isla Vista too. I go to his house after school and watch TV with him, sitting on his couch holding hands while his parents are at work. I’m hyperaware of his long muscular body beside me, his fresh pink cheeks, the dark curls beside his ears.
I’m even considering bringing him over to meet my family. I never bring anyone over because our funky, crowded, tiny apartment in the middle of the makeshift Hmong village is Not Normal. But I know Philip well enough by now to know that he’d like my secret fort on top of the roof now that the Hmong took down the deer heads. Maybe he’d even kiss me up there. I get all tingly imagining his mouth touching mine.
One morning, Pop has an unfamiliar spark of animation in his eyes, and he tells me, “Be home for a family confab.”
My gut knots. Not another confab!
That evening, Mom and Pop gather us in the tiny living room, sitting on Anita’s couch-bed. Pop leans forward, and the light falls on his big, square hands, battered and scraped from handling lumber. The deep creases in his face have lifted upward—the black fog of his angry depression is gone, and his eyes gleam with excitement. Even Mom, who’s been quiet and preoccupied since Wendy’s birth, is smiling, bouncing Wendy on her knees.
“Good news, girls,” Pop says. “I’ve been looking for a job back on Kauai for months now, and I finally got one. We’re going to be caretakers for a nice estate back in Hanalei Valley.”
I let down my guard.
I quit monitoring Mom and Pop, got caught up in my own life as a teenager, and forgot my parents’ other addiction: the lush paradise island of Kauai, with its drip-castle mountains, lush waterfalls, and pristine, uncrowded surf.
Of course, I don’t agree to go back to Kauai meekly.
I rage, slam doors, and accuse them of selfishness. “Just when I was starting to like my life!” I cry, thinking of Philip and the soccer team and my little, hard-won group of friends. Mom and Pop are unmoved, fixed on returning to their drug of choice.
“You might like your life here, but I hate mine,” Pop says. “The grind of the nine to five. Cold, crowded surf. All these people packed in one space. Kauai will be different this time. We have a job and a place to live, from day one.”
The reservations are made, the tickets purchased. The only bright spot is that Gigi and Grandpa Jim, alarmed by my hysteria about attending Kapa`a High where I’m just sure that Kira Yoshimura is the reigning queen, agree to pay for the tuition for Bonny and me to attend Island School again.
Dawn and my other lunchtime buddies make me a mock yearbook and sign it with good wishes. “You’re so lucky, going to live in Hawaii!”
Ha. If they only knew how we lived. I nurse the flame of resentment with angry poetry and angst-ridden journal entries. Philip finally kisses me, but it’s a sweet and devastating kiss goodbye.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Taro Fields and Swans
Me with my sisters and cousin Jennifer
Age: 15, Kuntz Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1981
We get a ride from the airport to the new estate where we’ll be living and working with our old friends Tom and Cheri Hamilton. Piled in the back of Tom’s pickup, their surfboards temporarily gone, we make a left turn onto a potholed, sandy-dirt road in the middle of town next to the Wai`oli Hui`ia Church, the scene of my attack after hula lessons so long ago. Seeing the spot still gives me an internal shiver.
The taro fields on either side of the narrow road, square plots filled with water and fed by a system of canals, reflect a deep blue, layered sky filled with rosy-edged cumulus clouds. The kalo plants themselves have large, heart-shaped leaves of dark green on slender, upright stems like anthuriums. White egrets and herons stand still as statues in their midst, hunting small fish. The stunning backdrop of the three mountains that frame the main house, Mamalahoa, Hihimanu, and Namolokama, are gushing waterfalls and seem to have their rugged valley arms extended open in welcome.
The owner’s house is a modern multi-story masterpiece in silvery cedar set off by a big, deep green pond with two swans circling in it within an acre or so of lawn. The whole estate is set like a jewel in the framework of the fields.
Our new boss and his family are out of town when we arrive, which is a good thing because the “caretaker cottage” we’re supposed to live in turns out to be a one-room shack with no electricity or bathroom. The five of us females stare at two unfinished rooms in semi-horror: the shack’s only plumbing is the kitchen sink.
Mom swivels to glare at me, daring me to speak. “I’m sure we can make this work.” She shifts Wendy to her other hip. “We can rig up an outdoor shower and build a composting toilet.”
“Yep, no problem. I’ll fix it up!” Pop is undaunted by this setback and galvanized by his escape from the lumber mill. I roll my eyes and stomp off to keep from saying all the things I’m thinking. Mom and Pop are still really good at getting work and babysitting out of me as punishment for sassy comments.
Pop continues to be cheerful and energetic as he takes the owner’s truck to town and buys lumber, nails, and screens to expand the guesthouse. He drops us off at Lihue Library, where we stock up on books, and he borrows one on composting toilets.
He builds the toilet outside the kitchen window of our cottage, following plans in the library book. The finished product is a five-foot-high box accessed via a ladder. There’s a hole in the top of the box to squat over. A big handful of leaves and grass clippings is kept in a bucket and dropped in when we finish. The broken-down waste can be raked out the front through a small door and used on the garden.
We even get to use real toilet paper, not just leaves like at the Forest House. It doesn’t smell, and he sands the hole so splinters don’t go into our butts if we sit on the hole. But, it’s positioned right in front of the kitchen window where our bare asses are hanging out for all to see, and there’s no surround. The shower he rigs up is also exposed; a hose tied to a Java plum tree with an o
ld wooden pallet to stand on so the ever-present mud doesn’t get on our feet while showering.
* * *
I will never be able to bring a friend over to the house in case they have to go to the bathroom because there is no privacy whatsoever. Apparently, it’s too much work for Pop to build a privacy surround for either area. I get assigned yard work when I point out the limitations. “If you’ve got energy to complain, you’ve got plenty of energy for work,” Mom says.
The location out in the middle of agricultural land is out of range of any of the usual town comforts and normal zoning, so the utilities at the estate are “off the grid” and consist of a solar water heater, a generator, and a well and cesspool for the main house only.
With no electricity but a generator that sounds like a sledgehammer running at top speed, and a budget that doesn’t include batteries, I don’t even have my little transistor radio anymore—even if it could have picked any music up in remote Hanalei.
Pop gives me ten hours a week of his job hours now that I’m a strong and sturdy fifteen, just like the old days at the Estate. Bonny gets hours as well. In addition, we put in Mom’s food garden in a raised concrete bed designed for that purpose but overflowing with weeds.
So far, my experience of Kauai sucks. We’re cut off from everyone and do nothing but work. Once again, my only escape is reading.
Pop’s “renovation” of the shack finally ends. Bonny and I share a section of screened-in porch at the front. We bicker so much in the tiny six-foot by ten-foot space that Pop loses his temper one day as we’re screaming at each other.
“You want to be by yourself, Toby, you got it,” he growls. “Anything to get you out of the house.”
I help him build me my own room out of screen and plywood, tacked onto the back of the house. It’s a six-by-ten box with no access to the main house, and screen on three sides as a cost-saving measure. As an angry almost sixteen-year-old with no phone, TV, or transportation, this suits me just fine. I retreat to a homemade bed with a foam mattress on it, enjoying a view of the taro fields in private splendor through screened walls.